Skip to main content

tv   U.S. Senate  CSPAN  October 5, 2012 12:00pm-5:00pm EDT

12:00 pm
try to do things that are going to help everybody giving it and i think that is what he did. he worked this out in the economy. he also worked hard on the health care bill that incidentally a third of all of the latino children are uninsured. all of the families, said it is a big win for us and the same for the african-american community, but it wasn't just for a specific community. i think that he shied away from those issues which is like for us we didn't get immigration reform done. >> final comment from hector. >> i just want to say talking about the most moving and humbling moment in life is when i was on the march where i had the [inaudible] where dr. king spoke almost 50 years ago. there was unique. but some of the comanches were
12:01 pm
marching with the african-american children singing together in the symbolism of coming together almost 50 years to fight for the same issue for the right to vote but also on the workers' rights and education is very important, and we need to keep focus on that level of unity because together we can for 30% of the piatt to become pie as we need to work together understanding each community with high priorities that reflect the interest of the common working class. >> i don't want 30% of the pie. i want at least 50. all right, folks, give it up for the panel. [applause]
12:02 pm
we i want to thank all of you that what this as well. thank you very much. tell your friends and family members to check the voter registration in their state. the first group of states comes in october 6th, the second is october 9th we'd have them check those states because of the are not registered buy then, they will not be about to vote on any other races come november. thanks so much. have a good night. [applause] before you leave i want to add to what rowland said. there is a website called canivote.org. if you go to that website will be able to put in your state, name, address and see if you are registered to vote in your state and if not it will tell you where to go to do that. on behalf of tomorrows to the foundation we i want to thank you all for attending tonight's town hall meeting and a special thank you to the moderator for roland martin and the
12:03 pm
distinguished panelists and our evened sponsors, pharmaceuticals here in front and the host, dr. franklin smith. so tonight's discussion highlighted issues and concerns that affect us all to be our hope is that you will return to the your communities and families and in power others to get engaged in the global process. we must remember our vote does count and we can create the change we want to see. once again, thank you for your participation and we hope that will inspire others to register to vote and go to the polls november 6. one last thing if you are not registered tonight there is voter registration at the table it says voter registration you can register to vote or get information on where to vote. with that, thank you and the panelists and everyone again. thank you. [applause]
12:04 pm
>> [inaudible conversations] this story was part of peter
12:05 pm
batres coverage of the debate on the front page of yesterday's "new york times" philosophy once highest season essential governmental and the other side that is just to get out of the way. it's also the subject of a fairly new poll from gilpin group majority and usa government doing too much. still the majority of americans, 54% continue to believe the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to individuals and businesses. the high as 61% this summer. four out of ten americans, 39% say the government should do more to solve the nation's problems. we want to turn to you and ask you what do you believe the role of the government should be in your life? let's listen to president obama as he answered that question in the debate this week to inspect the first role of the government is to keep people safe. that is the most basic function, and as commander-in-chief, that is something that i have worked
12:06 pm
on and thought about every single day that i've been in the oval office. but i also believe that government has the capacity, the federal government has the capacity to help open up opportunities and create ladders of opportunity and create frameworks' where the american people can succeed. the genius of america is the free enterprise system and freedom, and the fact that people can go out there and start a business, work on an idea, make their own decisions, but as abraham lincoln understood, there's also things we do better today. so, in the middle of the civil war, abraham lincoln said let's help finance the transcontinental railroad. let's start the national academy of sciences. let's start the land grant colleges because we want to give the gateway if they are giving
12:07 pm
opportunity we are all going to be better off. that doesn't restrict people's freedom, that enhances it. so what i have tried to do as president is to apply the same principles. >> that's president obama from the debate this week on the role of government. now let's listen to his challenger, mitt romney, with his answer to that question. >> first, life and liberty. we have a responsibility to protect the life and liberty of our people and that means military second to none. i do not believe in cutting the military. i believe in maintaining the strength of america's military. second, in the line that says we are in doubt by our creator with rights i believe we must maintain our commitment to religious tolerance and freedom in this country. that statement also says that we are endowed by our creator with a right to pursue happiness as we choose. i interpret that as one, making sure those are less fortunate and can't care for themselves are cared for by one another.
12:08 pm
we're a nation that believes we're children of the same god and we care for those that have difficulties. those that are older and have problems and those that are disabled. we care for them and we look for innovation and all these things desired out of the american heart to provide the pursuit of happiness for our citizens. but we also believe in maintaining for individuals the right to pursue their dream and not to have the government substitute itself for the rights of free individuals. what we are seeing right now is in my view a trickle-down government approach which has the government thinking it could do a better job than people pursuing their dreams and it's not working. >> now we've heard from the president and the man the would like to be president. begin with steve in new york. you are on the air. good evening. >> caller: yes - level of the government is to protect basic rights and there is nothing more basic than clean air and water and this is what has totally been forgotten in the last year
12:09 pm
and a half, two years of the debate. the ecology is not even mentioned in this basically a simplifies modern man's complete this association and disconnection from the natural world to the point of nature distain. that is the basic difficulty. in fact, the attachment is so great that it's even skewed the perception of the reality. you are constantly hearing the word growth and overlooking one simple fact. you cannot grow indefinitely on a finite planet of the finite natural resources especially water. so, all of these candidates are neglecting this. and this is life itself and it has nothing to do with americans in the survival and i would like these candidates to address. when you consider energy more
12:10 pm
important than water. >> host: thanks from buffalo new york. what should the government be in our life? we posted on new york in my personal life while the federal government not much. state come of it more, local, a lot more. the federal government should be maintaining harmony among the states keeping them in line regards to protecting americans' rights keeping the nation in harmony that is on facebook. next up is cheri watching in des moines. an independent. good morning. >> caller: yes, i do agree with mitt romney. i think the government is getting way too big. that's my comment. thank you. >> host: next up is less in
12:11 pm
detroit. he wore on. good morning. >> caller: good morning. we in michigan have to decide in november whether to allow the state to come in to the city and as a public use to take over and print the financial manager were emergency manager for the cities that have financed the distress and take over the local government where they can come in and remove the city officials like the mayor and the city council. i don't think that's the the presidential candidate mitt romney had in mind when he wanted to say states have rights. what about the city's rights to elect their own elected officials? and help do they own? when you say government interference, i understand you were talking about the federal government, but i heard mitt
12:12 pm
romney say that states' rights, is it the rights of the state's coming into the cities to overthrow the local municipalities? if that's a big government, small government, i don't know, is it controlled government? i think they have a right to control their own destiny in their own city. so the public is on the ballot in november, and i am turning everybody in michigan to vote down. we don't need dictatorship. it is a dictated view. >> host: thanks so much on the mall of the government in relation to the city and its relationship with federal government. and detroit. swb writes the government should do its job and maintain the general welfare. from debate news the numbers are in on how many people watched on television. more than 600 million watched the debate in this election cycle nearly 15 million were going to watch the first presidential debate four years ago.
12:13 pm
about 12 of the 67 that watched president obama square off against mitt romney on wednesday were in the ages of 18 to 34, nearly 31 million for 55 years or older. fox news channel averaged 10.4 million viewers that's an improvement over 8.24 years ago. cnn had about 6.1. about a million of your drop from the late. but still strong enough to beat msnbc's average of 4.7 million. this number of course does not include the numbers of people that watched on the internet or their mobile devices, and also c-span is not included in ratings to get there are basic numbers. 67 million people watching on television. next what's here on the role of government to trace of debate question is a call from carvin who is in hamilton montana. you are on. good morning, an independent. >> caller: yes, i think the government is here to help us do the intangible things we cannot do as individuals by ourselves, and i just want to say that the
12:14 pm
headlines down there in denver colorado where mitt romney winds i felt that was very disingenuous of the press buy not find enough the fact is going back to where the denver post was in reporting in the morning that mitt romney lied. i mean, because that was an awful disgrace what was going on during the debate, with him lying like that over and over again, flipping and flopping it i just want people to know that the press was not there to do their job, they were there to persuade the opinion and was disgraceful for the denver post pressed to do that. >> host: back to facebook. choose a post from the community builders, stan brigety no. they write the government is the way that we do to get there that which we cannot do alone. that is their point of view. the different role is to provide
12:15 pm
a basic safety net to its citizens while seeking long-term incentives to build a competitive and prosperous nation. about the role of government its facebook.com find the c-span's site. next is a call from dennis watching in upper marlboro maryland. your honor, good morning. >> caller: good morning and thank you for the opportunity. first, a lot of the smart people out there in the c-span's family stole my thunder on a lot of these points. but, i think basically we need a moderate to strong federal government because i see these right-wing nuts out there in the country crying about the states' rights, and they want less federal government. you know, a brimley and ran into
12:16 pm
this problem. we've seen this before where certain states broke away from the nation and started the civil war for god sake. either we are going to have to face the fact that we are all americans and we have a moderate to strong federal government coming and the reason for that is because our government players is very important role around the world. it's not just in america, but the world looks to our country, the leadership, and not only can we have that in my opinion, my humble opinion, is the moderate to strong federal government. >> host: thanks for being part of the discussion, dennis. next is louis in pennsylvania. an independent. what part of the state? >> caller: northeast. >> host: welcome to the discussion. >> caller: no problem. good morning. basically several of the callers
12:17 pm
i am in line with their opinion. i believe the role of the work government is rooted in the constitution, and from that i believe that the government's need to do what we as governments can't achieve on our own, and i want to point to the groups such as speed. even the businesses couldn't have to get us to the moon in 1959. so we have to continue to look at the government and each and every problem that is presented but to see is this something that could be done by individual states or businesses or is this something that is apparently only the government can solve if we the people come together unified under that government and the government puts those resources to words. i've often heard about people paying taxes or taxes are too high they are not appropriate. and we appreciate having fun postal service and the schools
12:18 pm
and programs like nasa that had kicked back and have given wonderful technologies that propelled us and meet people's lives more comfortable than they would have been had those technologies not entered their lives. >> host: question for you, louis. given what you say is the benefit of the government, right now is the government about the right size and what is its influence on your life? >> caller: i.t. we have to be careful when we throw the word size of the government because they're seems to be a misunderstanding as to what the size of the government is as well as the size of the government. but the reality is the problems dictate the size of the government and we shrink the government by reducing the number of federal employees and we actually then end up contacting people to do those tasks any way and we tend not to
12:19 pm
count them as the part of the government that they are a part of the government. we are just paying more for that resource now and people need to kind of recognize that when we take our resources it is a finite amount. it truly is coming and we take that finite amount of resources and we decide we are not going to pay the federal employee to do it, but we still have to fix the roads, or we still have to repair or keep the schools and we are going to contact someone to do those and we are paying more for it to do that. so, the size of the government is dictated by the problems that we haven't solved, not by the number of employees that we hired. >> host: thanks for joining in from pennsylvania the government role should ensure the common needs are met. economically it should be more and socially it should be less. more debate stories from the tv writer for "the new york times" as a harsh light falls on a moderator jim lehrer his house
12:20 pm
page piece in the newspaper one goal achieved perhaps to stay out of the way. he writes the critiques came from several sides of the media spectrum of leader the complaints seemed the loudest from the left. and more he put out a comment yesterday in response to the critique, and here is the "washington post" this morning. he sent this e-mail that said i thought the format accomplished its purpose which was to facilitate the direct exchanges between the candidates about issues of substance, he said in a statement e-mail on thursday. part of the moderator mission was to stay out of the way, and i had no problem with doing so. the only personal frustration was discovering that 90 minutes was not enough time and that more open format to cover every issue that deserved attention. one of the issues was of course the role of the government, and so we are asking you to tell us about this morning. next is a call from tama in
12:21 pm
washington. republican. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i think the will of the government is to do big things like national defense and build highways and education. and also making environment where it's easy enough for businesses to hire people and employ people and kind of stay out of everybody's way. >> host: how is it doing on those? >> caller: i don't think it's doing really well when the minimum wage is sitting at $10 an hour in some states. it's not there yet but it's getting very quick. and that isn't enough to employ people some people like myself, a small businessman, it's hard for me to employ more people when i'm having to pay so much for everything. the price of everything is going up, the price of fuel, the price of electricity, the price of food, the price of everything is going up right now. so i don't think the government is doing a good job. >> host: thanks in washington. "the wall street journal" this morning another comparison between the two candidates is and so much on the role of government, the definition of
12:22 pm
patriotism. president barack obama says he wants the new economic patriotism that mitt romney calls the presidential campaign a battle for the soul of america. the candidates are not only racing to win an election but they are dueling over the mantle of patriotism with each claiming to stand for the true american values, the implication still beyond rhetoric and extend to their thinking about domestic and foreign policy which is what we are talking about this morning. next is a call from janice in louisiana. a democrat. good morning. >> caller: hello. yes, i would like the government to [inaudible] >> host: janice, are you still there? we lost her. apologies. let's move on to gary in eaton ohio. independent. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i think -- i feel that the constitution is there to tell the government what they are supposed to do.
12:23 pm
and like the guy that brought up water, the epa puts fluoride, they tell you have to have so much fluoride in water. there's something that it's in rat poison and that is why they're having to put so much of it in the water. now they've done a good job training at to water, but the deal is we don't get the news. the news is blocked. just like i ran that thing, the spring in iraq and iran and libya and everywhere that wasn't caused by a movie. it's all blow back and they are
12:24 pm
lying to the american people about. we can't get the news that we need to be donald man. i've got nothing kaput time but some people don't have the time to sit and -- >> host: thanks, gary. back to facebook, the role of government should be very, very limited. a duty for liberty and right to keep me free and uphold the rule of law to ensure the system if we suffer injury in the physical sense or through fraud. the government can't keep us safe and it's so limited they should not be telling me that i have to buy health insurance or i will get taxed more. what should the role of government be in your life we are asking you in this morning's journal. it states in the constitution of the federal government is to do. 18 enumerations, the rest are reserved for the state's and the
12:25 pm
people. next call, jeff in texas. good morning to you, sir. >> caller: that would be kevin in washington. >> host: good morning. you are on the air. go ahead. >> caller: i believe that if the proper role of the federal government is to protect individual liberties we are supposed to have rules against that, against fraud, against the injured. but the problem is the federal government has gone way beyond that. it seems like they want to redistribute what people have gained through their liberties and freedoms and once you do that, you are violating people's liberties. i think that they have gone too far. they're telling us what kind of light bulbs to buy, of cars to drive, what insurance they have. it's ridiculous. it really is. we need to let the states focus on that kind of stuff, and the federal government should really just stick to the constitution
12:26 pm
as obama said. >> host: garrey on twitter rights the federal government should stay out of our bedrooms, out of the classroom, out of the board room and protect our borders. next is a call. cynthia is in district heights. welcome. >> caller: good morning. i agree with the number one point of obama as far as keeping us safe. but that doesn't necessarily mean just militarily. i think that the state's need to take care of themselves, and the government should be its own system with checks and balances where the state's fall short and the government comes in and makes sure the states do their job. it seems as though to me i have less trust in the government, and it seems as though it's become more of a celebrity issue
12:27 pm
instead of a government issue. i see the congress and the senate as celebrities more so than the people who are concerned with the welfare as a united states population. >> host: more debate news. this is from the kentucky newspaper about the upcoming vice presidential d date in central college in danville kentucky urging the october you love and presidential debate that it could cost about $3.3 million says the newspaper through the colleges students and the public are not expected to pay most of it. just the security of the college had to commit 1.65 million to the commission on presidential debates. separately the college is paying for the construction said the facilities made by the democratic campaigns and the news media it hopes to recoup most of the cost by billing them. for instance news organizations have to pay $40 for one with
12:28 pm
electricity to 1900 for a television network parking space. campaigns must pay to 25 for a desk, 124a many frig, $60 for a full-length mirror and chairs are $12 that you can get one without padding for ten. that is a look at the financing for the debate. presidential debates cost a bit more than that $3.3 million because the additional security. next is a call from joe iain who is watching in palm beach florida. an independent. good morning. >> caller: good morning. i think the role of the government should be exactly what the constitution states, no ifs and buts. and also, anyone who is running for any type of elective office, appointed office or employment in the federal government these
12:29 pm
people should be thoroughly investigated, and it amazes me that obama was not completely investigated and people are within the government. thank you very much. >> host: thank you. later on in the program we have to sequential female journalists and writers as the guest. and about 19, 20 minutes will be anncoulter, she has a new book called mugged, and the 70's to obama, and then katrina who is the editor and publisher of the nation and columnist for what appears in "the washington post" will be our guest continuing to talk about the campaigns and
12:30 pm
some more expensive issues and your calls and tweets will be involved in that as well. .. ing >> live now to the american
12:31 pm
enterprise institute for discussion on google's antitrust allegations. the company is accused of blocking some businesses during internet searches. let you know really quickly we'll break away from the discussion at 1:00 eastern what should be a very brief session of the u.s. senate and we'll turn back to the discussion. >> greg is the chairman of criterion economics in washington, d.c. he is the professor of law and economics at tilberg law and economic center in the netherlands. in addition to being distinguished author and scholar he was long time the wire houser fellow in law and economics at aei where he directed a research initiative on telecommunications regulation. today greg will discuss a paper he coauthored with judge robert bork, titled, what does the chicago school teach about inner net search and antitrust treatment of google? judge bork is of course a
12:32 pm
leading figure in antitrust scholarship. in addition to having been sew listory general of the united states, an acting attorney general, a judge for the united states court of appeals for the district of columbia and supreme court nominee he was also for many years a fellow here at the american enterprise institute. george priest will be joining us, actually by conference call today. where you see george's there is no george but there is a phone. george is professor of law and economics at yale law school and codirector of the john owens center for law, economics and public policy at the yale law school. he also happens to be aei's chairman of our council economic advisors. george was supposed to be coming down from laguardia. he was at laguardia today. his plane got canceled. they were saying there were technical different consults as they often do on the shuttle.
12:33 pm
aei was a hotbed of deregulatory research in '70s and '80s that led to airline deregulation. looks like we have a lot of work we still have to do. so but it is good to have george even if just over a teleconference. joining us is jeff eisenach. he served as senior positions at u.s. fred trillion trade commission and office of management and budget. adjunct professor at the george mason university school of law. he is also visiting scholar here at aei, recently added to our roster. jeff, good to have you here. we're joined and pleased to note randy picker. randy currently teaches classes in antitrust law and network industries among other disciplines at university of chicago law school. coauthor of the book, game theory and the law, and served associate dean of university ever chicago law school. here is how we're going to proceed. greg will come up and talk for about 20 minutes or so about his paper.
12:34 pm
then we're going to hear from our discussion, starting with george. and then jeff and randy and then greg will have a little bit of time to respond to that. we want plenty of time for q&a at the end. so as you're listening to the discussion, please as you have questions, there will be time for that at the end. so with that, please join me in welcoming greg sidak. greg? [applause] >> thank you very much. it's a great pleasure to be back here with friend at aei. this paper or this talk is based on a paper that i've done with judge robert bork, my former colleague here at aei, and i want to acknowledge mrs. bork, mary ellen and bob, jr., out in the audience. let me say at the outset, this presentation and the paper that, its based upon
12:35 pm
which i will available today if not already available on aei website and also the criterion website is work that was commissioned by google but the views that are expressed and the conclusions that are reached in the paper are sole those of judge bork and myself. well, the title of the paper presents this question of the chicago school perspective on these questions of search and google. so i thought before we dive into issues of internet search, we have some common understanding what the chicago school of antitrust analysis is. i got associate the chicago school with the writings and teachings of a number of people at chicago but also a
12:36 pm
broader, i'll call it the honorary chicago school that maybe did their ph.ds and other work there and populated other universities but the key people were in the early days director and, ed levy, ronald kost george seeing letter, a number of people won nobel prize in economics. judge bork was a student at that time. this is in the '50s. later on richard posner arrived in about 1969 or 70 after spending a year at stanford. he had students including frank easterbrook and george priest. meanwhile, out on the west coast where i grew up and went to school there was bill baxter who is one of these honorary chicagoans. never taken a degree there
12:37 pm
but certainly discovered economics and was very much part of this same movement. and of course by the mid to late '70s the writings of the chicago school started influencing the supreme court a great deal and then in the '80s a number of members of this intellectual cadre became judges themselves and further influenced the shape of the law. i think that some of the distinguishing characteristics of the chicago school of antitrust analysis is is first with respect to horizontal conspiracy, cartels. it's got a very hard-line attitude. cartels are serious sources of injury to consumers and should be aggressively enforced against and punished.
12:38 pm
and so 30 years or so ago when i was a student i coauthored an article that had subtitles, should we hang a price fixer now and then? that kind of captures the flavor of the intensity of that chicago school approach. again, influenced i guess, neglected to mention gary becker, another person in this, of course he wrote very influentially on the optimal enon forcement of laws and his principle insight was when behavior escapes detection with some significant probability you have to ratchet up it to offset the likelihood that the behavior will go undetected. so in forms of behavior that are intentionally concealed like cartel behavior that argues for a very strong multiple damage once liability has been found. now in other areas of
12:39 pm
economic behavior where firms are cooperating with one another but not restricting output and raising price i think one of the key contributions of the chicago school, and i associate this particularly with ronald kost, when you see some form of business contracting, some sort of strategy or structure of organization and you don't understand it, you shouldn't leap to the conclusion that there's some nefarious anti-competitive purpose. the, i think the kost theme is you look instead for some underlying efficiency justification before you go out about condemning the behavior. that i think is a very strong theme that the chicago school has imparted to american antitrust jurisprudence and we see that in a number of the
12:40 pm
supreme court cases looking at joint ventures and complicated contractual relationships. then finally and mergers are sort of a subcategory of that i will say. but then finally we get to single firm conduct. the mow no monopolyization problem. the chicago school, carries presumption you shouldn't condemn behavior of a dominant firm simply because it is big. there are, there are efficiency justifications that are associate the with scale and scope of an enterprise. you want to be cautious that you don't end up detering incentives for firms to accomplish those kinds of efficient ways of organizing and along with that over dynamic context you don't
12:41 pm
want to create incentives for firms to refrain from investing in innovative activity. and i think that set of insights of course plays very heavily in the area of high-tech and antitrust, so the microsoft case now, sorts of issues that are being raised about google. let me share with you a few great quotes from the chicago school that encapsulate these principles. first here's one from frank easterbrook from the fame pous article the limits of antitrust written in 1984. every successful practice has victims. another one from judge bork quoted by the supreme court in ryder. the sherman act was clearly presented in debated as a consumer welfare prescription.
12:42 pm
here's something that judge posner wrote. there's a sense in which the exclusion of any competitor reduces competition but it's not the sense of competition that is relevant to antitrust law. the policy of competition is intended for the malt benefit of consumers rather than individual consumers. consumers has no interest in fixed number of competitors greater than number required to assure he is being to able to buy at a competitive price. some of you may not know that judge posner, although e he is frequently credited made major contributions to law and economics himself was not a trained economist. when he was undergraduate at yale he was an english literature major. i particularly like this passage from one of his antitrust cases where quoting hamlet he says,
12:43 pm
there's a special provenance in the fall of a sparrow is not the contemporary philosophy of antitrust. so there's the sense in the chicago school that competition is a race and any race that is a winner and it will have losers and we don't elevate the welfare of the losers over the welfare of the intended beneficiaries of that competitive process which are consumers. so consumers versus competitive welfare, that's the big insight and contribution of the chicago school. i guess i come to think that this was self-evident but just this week i had an interesting conversation with an indian lawyer. he is the head of the dehli office of one of the respected indian law firms. there is just now a quite a a wave of development in india in antitrust law and i
12:44 pm
was talking to her about this paper which she was going to be presenting. she said that is quite an idea. antitrust isn't intended to protect competitors. and i thought, well, yeah that's what we've been doing here in the united states in the american antitrust just prize den for about -- jurisprudence about 40 years. that is not something immediately office when you go outside the united states particularly in countries that don't have a well-established body of antitrust jurisprudence. well, let me turn now to, some of these, these questions regarding google. google provides a search engine and it provides it for free. how does google make any money giving something away for free? well it's a two-sided market as economists call it. on the one hand you have people who want to engage in search. they want to find things quickly, and effortlessly through the internet.
12:45 pm
and, on the other side of the market there are advertisers who are happy to, to, purchase advertising from google, that will be presented to these consumers who reveal themselves through their searches to be interested in looking for particular things. a restaurant or kind of a car or a book, what have you. and so the funding of the platform comes from the advertiser side of the market and consumers do their part by lending their eyeballs essentially to the screen that will be presented in front of them and this is not fundamentally different from radio broadcasting, tv broadcasting in the united states but it's taken to a much higher level of value added in the sense that because you, the consumer, reveal through your search what you're really looking for advertisers are able to zero in on a potential
12:46 pm
audience for what they have to sell to a much greater extent than was ever public before internet search developed as a business. so the interest that google has then in offering its search engine to consumers is to make it as easy to use and as valuable in terms of delivering good results so that google is able to maximize the audience size for the advertisers who are paying for all this. so with that as an overriding principle about how a search engine market operates i would like to address a few of the higher level questions that have come up in the current debate in the u.s. regarding google's behavior and whether it presents an antitrust problem. and i'm only going to focus
12:47 pm
on questions that have arisen in the u.s. an are analyzed under u.s. antitrust law. there are three broad questions i would like to talk about. one is, does google's ranking of specialized search, and i will explain that in a minute, does that harm consumers, ranking specialized search results highly on the page as distinguished from general search results? a second question is, does google deprive competitors of some necessary scale that is needed to compete in search? and part of, a related question that is embedded in these first two is, whether there is some kind of
12:48 pm
essential facility that google has that competitors need to get access to in order to be able to compete effectively in the search market? and again the overriding question is, does any of this have an impact on the welfare of consumers? it may be that certain competitors are, encounter a disadvantage but does it ultimately have a harm on consumers? so let me, let me go to the slide, the one that shows search results. that one, exactly. okay. so this particular slide gives you a screen shot if you were entering the search
12:49 pm
smoothies, washington, d.c. so if you're interested in maybe drippinging a smoothty or finding out how to make a smoothty you typed in this search request, this result would pop up. the bluish results near the bottom are known as the general search results. the pink area are the specialized search results which actually anticipate that the person doing the search might be interested in finding a place to go buy a smoothie. and so that information is then generated and prioritized on the page so that the consumer can find it easily. and then there's a map that's generated that pinpoints where these particular vendors of smoothies are located. a big question has been raised whether this kind of placement of specialized
12:50 pm
search results is a disadvantage to competitors. and there are a few points here that's, i think are worth considering. one is that this practice now of embedding specialized search results is something that is being done by google's competitors. microsoft for example launched binge and it said -- bing. to build on the benefits of today's search engines but to move beyond this experience to give users a new, that are better, experience, microsoft was going to focus on four key
12:51 pm
vertical areas and the verticality is idea of providing specialized search results. making a search condition and planning a trip or finding a local business. one point that judge bork has made in his opinions on the d.c. circuit in the rothery case, a well-known case from 1986 is that when some --. i think we might have lost george. when there's some challenged practice that is in fact adopted by all the competitors in a marketplace, that creates the presumption that that practice is in fact the result of competitive rivalry.
12:52 pm
this gets back to this kind of view tat you shouldn't be, you shouldn't presume that practices that are new and different are harmful to competitors. i'm sorry, to consumers. and in fact when you see all competitors in the market doing something the fact that the largest firm in the market does it as well is not evidence that this is a practice that is some how creates or perpetuates monopoly power. in the case of these specialized search ranks, google presumably would not do this unless it believed that the results were valued by consumers. that google as a search engine becomes more valuable with the insertion of specialized results along
12:53 pm
with general search results because if it were something that consumers didn't value, google would be reducing its, the potential audience size for its search engine and people would switch over to a rival. i glossed over one question. i should have mentioned it, when i was laying out my, my big picture questions. the first big picture question that of course comes up again and again, is google the gateway to the internet? this gets to a question what are the switches costs from moving to one search engine to another? there's quite a bit of research now being done on this question. it seems it suggest that the search costs are very, low. you can, can switch during a single about session on your computer from google to bing to something else. you can use specialized
12:54 pm
vertical search engines like amazon and of course you can also rely on noninternet based tools to try to find things as well. so the, but the search costs for moving from google to bing, for example, are essentially zero. so you're starting with a product that is provided for free. it you don't like it, you can switch to another product that is provided for free. for the investment of maybe 10 or 15 seconds of navigating on the screen of your computer. so when you have this kind of immediate ability to shift from one supplier to another the fact that one company has a very large volume of searches for example, by itself doesn't tell you anything about whether that's injurious to consumers. in fact it suggests they
12:55 pm
have a high share of searches because consumers like the way they put together their search results more than some alternative that is available. this comes up then, again, something known as the single monopoly profit theorum that the chicago school developed which says that if you have, if you want to think of vertical searches like this, the specialized searches as being something different than from generalized searches and if you think that google has market power in generalized searches and somehow is trying to monopolize specialized searches, you would then bump up against this traditional chicago school critique known as the single monopoly profit theorum. and that is if you have vertically related services or products there's only so much monopoly profit that a firm can extract and if google already has a
12:56 pm
monopoly over general search, it can't extract anymore profit by trying to monopolize specialized search. now again bear in mind that consumers in this case are paying zero. so it's not clear how that monopolization theory, if you thought it was credible really would play out. it has to play out on the other side of the market, on the advertising side of the market but the general contribution of the chicago school is that this idea of extending a monopoly doesn't make any sense because you already could extract all the monopoly profit from the first monopoly. you don't need to get another monopoly. taking a little longer than i thought to get through my points. so what i think i'm going to do is quickly talk about scale and essential facilities.
12:57 pm
the argument has been made that google, because it has such a large share of generalized search results, is denying competing search engines the ability to achieve sufficient scale to compete. and, i think there are several chicago school reactions to that. one is, what's the value of scale? and if you dig a little deeper into this critique of google, it is the scale generates the ability to make enough profit to invest in having an interesting search engine so that you have a larger audience size. that you can then offer to advertisers. the first problem with that of course is that you don't have to finance investment in your, embellishing your search engine solely through internally-generated cash flow. you can go out and borrow the money. that is a standard chicago
12:58 pm
critique of that kind of argument. the second critique goes to the basic idea what is scale? george stilgler had a famous definition of barriers to entry that said, and the barrier to entry literature specifically looked whether scale is some kind of a barrier. stigler said barrier to entry is something an entrant has to pay for that the incumbent didn't. but if the incumbent also had to incur the cost that the entrant is now complaining about, that's not a barrier to entry because that entry barrier was incurred as well by the first firm in order to get into the market. with respect to the critics claim that they, there's, not enough scale achieved to compete effectively against
12:59 pm
google you have to dig a little deeper to see what it is they're talking about. it is not really a scale. it's cumulative searches over time. so it is kind of a cumulative output idea. the output of the search engine is enriched by cumulative number of searches and tuning of search engine happens over time. that is what an honorary chicagoan would call learning by doing. famous paper looking at how the cost of doing something is affected not just by how many times, how many units of output you produce in a given period of time like a year but also cumulative number of, of times you making. he looked at the question of building air frames during world war ii and the cumulative number of air frames that were built in the factories in southern california showed this phenomenal mathematical principle of declining with
1:00 pm
cumulative output over time. i think it is something more like that the critics of google are getting at when we talk about scale. it's not really economies of scale. it's a learning by doing phenomenon. so is there a problem, is there an inability of competitors of google. >> we're going to leave the american enterprise institute now for a brief pro-forma session of the u.s. senate. we will return to live coverage of this conversation on google's antitrust allegations in just a moment. now live to the senate floor e. the clerk: washington, d.c, october 5, 2012. to the senate: under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honeshonorable john d. rockefelr iv, a senator from the state of west virginia, to perform the duties of the chair. signed: daniel k. inouye, president pro tempore. the presiding officer: under the previous order, the senate stands adjourned until 11:00
1:01 pm
stands adjourned until 11:00 >> while situated today, people said the same sort of thing about microsoft a decade or so ago and its had its own share of competitive rivalry in the meantime. so i had no reason to think that google won't continue to face lots of competitive rivalry from innovations in search technology. i'll just say a few words about the essential facilities. the essential facilities doctrine is what judge said in her paper. the unicorn of antitrust law. everybody thinks they know what
1:02 pm
it looks like and now initially seen the doctrine in the flesh. the idea is that there some assets or some facility that's hard to duplicate, it's very costly to duplicate. the owner of the facility is excluding competitors from using it, and this has, there's a few other element to the task but it has the effect of excluding the compared and harming consumer welfare. well, in the case of internet search, and google's business practice specifically, the other served as such a facility is placed on google's page. but there's only a limited amount of space that can come up on a page. so it's not possible that every competitor that thinks it's essential to be on google's page can be accommodated. so it's not clear how such a
1:03 pm
revenue would be feasible even if you thought that it was necessary to do this in order to improve competition in a way that would benefit consumers. in any event, the u.s. courts were very reluctant to buy into the essential facilities theory. the supreme court has taken pains to say it is never itself endorse the idea. so i think it's very unlikely that, that an antitrust claim against the google, sounded like an essential facilities case would ever succeed in court. i think a better stop at this point because i've used it more than my allotted share of time. and if george is there on the other end of that phone -- >> greg, first of all thank you for excellent presentation. i think george got to drop. in addition to airline deregulation, we have to
1:04 pm
continue working on telephone the regulation. what i'm going to do is mix up the order and will try to get george back on. i will turn it over to jeff and then we'll go to randy and then george comes back, clinton's up once we have him back online. >> nic, thank you but it's an honor for me to be are speaking of old home week. i started working on deregulation issue of the american advice institute in june 1979. so it's great for me to be back after a long time. i think that the paper that greg and judge bork have done is really very excellent and i think rick has done a great job preventing -- present the cages in which wages and. i'd like to use my time to expand on three aspects of the issue that i think are pertinent. all of these are aspects that the paper touches on to one degree or another.
1:05 pm
but i'd like to call them out and drill down just a little bit on this reach characteristics of high-tech markets and have impact the way we think about the google issue. and those our first modularity and in a platform competition. secondly, the notion of multi-sidedness, which greatest talk about. and thirdly, diamond is a. so let's think about modularity and into platform competition. i think the paper is correct to express skepticism about applying traditional approaches to market definition and high-tech markets. i question how useful it is specifically to think of google search competing against microsoft or ask them as if search is relevant to the antitrust market. let alone whether specialized search is a separate market from general search or universal search.
1:06 pm
instead, i think may be more useful to think of search as a complementary input. in a much broader markets in which internet platforms compete to produce complex arrays of services which are consumed jointly by consumers. i'm talking about competition among platforms as opposed to between specific services or inputs to those platforms. so for google, search is the marquee product. is the centerpiece. but google also does operating systems, content, devices, e-commerce, maps am so-and-so for. for apple, the marquee product is devices. but it also does search, siri. e-commerce and so on so forth. maps now not very well i guess. i'm still on 5.0 waiting. microsoft, the marquee product
1:07 pm
is operating systems for amazon, its e-commerce but they both to all the other things as well. and we go on and talk about facebook and ebay and so on and so forth. well, these competing platforms. now, these firms, these platforms compete with one another on multiple dimensions. and it seems clear that each and all of them discipline the market conduct of all of the others. it's open to question i think whether modern economics as the tools or even the language to assess into platform competition. but i think we do know enough to at least conclude that focusing on say, market shares and the market for universal search isn't going to tell us very much about the competitive dynamics of how prices and qualities to determine for any of these products. in antitrust when you define markets incorrectly, you tend to get questionable results, or
1:08 pm
worse. take one example. when the justice department effectively stopped to google's proposed joint venture with yahoo!, at least partly on the theory that the deal would remove a competitor from the market and hence raise concentration, in the market for search, was the actual to preserve competition in the market for search engines. or was it to reduce competition in the market for online content and e-commerce platforms? question for another day. multi-sidedness, as the paper also correctly notes, the markets at issue here, however we define them for our multi-sited which is to say that one of their primary economic characteristics, their value proposition is to bring advertisers together with content producers, publishers, consumers and so forth. as david evans has pointed out, it makes no sense in such markets to talk about separate
1:09 pm
market for each customer group. to use his example is where chocolate heterosexual dating services quote, they do compete for man and woman customers, but it doesn't make any sense to talk about separate markets for men and women. we are all looking for a bar. by the same token, that was my -- looking for a bar. [laughter] by the same token, it makes no sense to talk about separate market for consumers search contents like to refuse in google places, and advertising. both the demand and the supply of the services are interrelated to both the demand and the supply complementary on both sides. the cost side and the demand side and evaluation site. but the biggest implication for antitrust analysis in these markets is there's no direct relationship between any and. will measure on the one hand and a competitive price on the other. and since market power in traditional antitrust analysis is defined as the ability to
1:10 pm
raise prices above cost, look in a merger guidelines or any place else, we define market are as the ability of a firm to raise prices above a competitive price unquote. which is usually defined as the term of caustic this creates a very fundamental challenges, especially if one things -- out to be part of the antitrust liability in an monopolization case, which most people and certainly chicago school think at least an element probably a define one. finally, dynamism. i think the paper correctly emphasizes the importance of dynamism in these markets. and mighty it's useful to think about dynamism in two senses, which are related but they are distinct. first in the economic sense. i will call it -- dynamism refers to markets in which firms compete to invest, innovate, differentiate and profit.
1:11 pm
what we see in these markets are firms making risky, and by risky i mean suck, investments in new products which are designed specifically, specifically for the person of creating a form of market are. i prefer to call pricing power, which is the inability to earn margins in excess of cost and earn back their investment. the whole point of the exercise is to make a risky investment, innovate, create something new and different, by doing so differentiate my product. by doing so earn myself a little place in the world where consumers come to me and being a little more than the next guy because i'm different, or at least better. and having done that, he able to charge prices above cost. if i do that someone will get me more money made and i can do it again, or try. that power, the power that comes
1:12 pm
out of those investments, and the product differentiation and innovation, it's the secret sauce in a very meaningful sense, the secret sauce of the innovation economy. in the case of google, specialized search looks a lot like such an innovation. product improvement that differentiates googles offering allows it to monetize its investment. we should be cautious about condemning such conduct for fear of discouraging precisely such innovation. the second sense in which trend is relevant is in the more colloquial sense of the term. and i do think it's useful to distinguish these. think about, it's little different from what i'm about to say which is the colloquial sense of things change quickly. i think when most people think about dynamism computers on about dynamism and the antitrust markets, you think about the competition are i think most
1:13 pm
people think about things change fast. and that's true. at the first sense is also extremely and so is i think more significant and an important way to think about the let's think about the colloquial sense. the risk here of him and here i think greg and judge or to a great job talking about remedies and the risk of potential remedies here, that the risk your lives and creating a de facto property right in the status quo. a right for example, for manufacturers of eight track tape decks to prevent carmakers from working on business. or classically a buggy whip manufacturers courage buggy makers, church records are moving onto cars. because there goes my market that i've invested in good faith. on the notion that cars, the carriages will continue to be made in my buggy will continue to be in demand.
1:14 pm
or for travel websites, to have a de facto right any particular piece of real estate on the google search page. so i think the paper is absolutely right to call attention to the dangers of moving towards such a course in which we are inhibiting innovation and creating a de facto property right for the status quo, which could also harm innovation. now let me just close by saying that cases like this will ultimately turn on the facts. it's not clear to me that all the facts are yet in. certainly more facts well i think at some point likely become apparent. but what i think they have done is help set the analytical standard, if you will, by which the facts ultimately will and should be judged. and to note that it is and that it ought to be a pretty high
1:15 pm
bar. thank you. >> okay, jeff, thank you. randy, we will bring you up and ask him you want to deliver -- while you're doing that towards the end i may try to get george back on the line. i know he's watching us now. so, randy, the floor is yours. >> thank you. so -- good. so, thanks for having me. what a wonderful topic. interesting paper, thoughtful paper. breaks discussion of the chicago school certainly resonated with me. i have three degrees from university of chicago, the college, the econ department, and the law school. i sent my kids to the left goes uncovered on that base as well. and i took price series on gary becker. what i learned from gerry is that you start all the situation
1:16 pm
with two premises. premise one is that people optimize subjects to constraint. premise two is the market is going. that's what you want to start. that is what i think of is the core of economic analysis and the core of chicago school antitrust analysis. i also have, i co-taught a seminar on collective action. and what i would learn from ronald is bad we have to look at the facts very carefully. ronald covey was going to take is 100 years to do that. so the study of transaction cost and he thought it was a 100 your study. i think ronald hoped to complete that study. and if you know ronald, he is aging but aging remarkably well. i want to talk about the issues that greg and judge bork raised. where want to start, i want to start with medium markets and how market powers at his site media market. so greg compared google to radio
1:17 pm
and tv and i think that's exactly the right thing to do. i think we want to think about market power in the situation. i start with google. google, if you haven't been there, this is the original home page at google launched, and google if you're looking carefully was a much more excitable company in those days. there's an exclamation point at the end of google. they were excited to be bringing their power to the web. the data model of google, and that's one thing to want to focus on, because there any transition on how they approach data. the data model of google was this idea that they're going to send out google bot and look at the web to look at websites, index and then to rank those and return those search for them. the page rank, patented algorithm that larry page invented was at the heart of the. that's the data model google
1:18 pm
starts with. i think what google did is what you hope congress will do. again, i agree with greg on this completely. they went out and built a great product. and that's what we want to see people do. and the absolute best way to acquire market power in a way that jeff talked about market power which is exactly the right way to do it. set prices above cost. the best way to acquire that market power is to build a great product, differentiate yourself from your competitors, to have a sustainable quality gap between you and your competitors. if that's what you do, you can have market power, and u.s. antitrust law says that's great, right? it is crystal clear on the. and we encourage you to go out into the marketplace win, exceed progress on your doing that legitimately, you are fine. there are no section to issues and we encourage you, you are entitled to set high prices and
1:19 pm
to earn the just rewards that flow from the. well, i want to talk about some have market power again maybe. so this is a picture of lucille ball in the early days of her television show. it is really hard to imagine, by shedding market share in 1951 of 67.3%. that is to say that two out of three to the households each night issues on watching her show. so how do you exercise market power in these situations? let's be clear on a couple of things. this is an assignment, the radio and tv environment much like the search engine environment. where competition is a click away. it wasn't a mouse click back and. you have to click the dial on your television set. competition was always a click away. there was no cost to switch and you didn't have to pay to switch. so it was easy to switch into situations and you might say how could the exercise market power. the answer is that you exercise market power to the volume and intensity of advertising.
1:20 pm
advertising is how you make money, and the value of advertising is how you boost how much money you can make. the easiest is to start i think there's a lot of discussion about whether google has market power in the advertising market. that's an interesting discussion. that's not the place to start. the place to start is in search engines, and we think company with a great successful product of my tech company of market power? if they did have market power, how would they go about exercising at? and the answer is they would have more advertising. they would have more ads and because it adds are a utility for consumers, consumers are not getting the content for free. consumers are getting the content by bearing the cost of that. i tried this the other day. i went to a website to if you go to the forbes website the first thing that happens is they present an ad. they do that because that's how you make money. the absence of media advertising
1:21 pm
is, is you degrade the product to make money. no one thinks the best way to tell stories is to build up to a great suspense, and then stop for five minutes to sell tacos. no one thinks that's the best way to sell a story. they do because that's the way they can monetize the story. they are not necessary interest in the corner of the product or their interest in what they can monetize. what they are allowed to do in these circumstances is to have lots of advertising. if you have a media power monopoly, you get to have lots of advertising and exercise the market by that would. u.s. antitrust law says that's perfectly fine. what you are not allowed to do is spend the market power to maintain that power, or to acquire power. that's what you are not allowed to do. so we come to google. i think we need to look at the advertising prices that google is implicitly charging to use its service. and that's what i spent the summer doing.
1:22 pm
so i learned how to do a little python programming. python is the language that runs youtube in dropbox, so i'm dangerous now. and that's what i've done. and i've studied chicago. so i find lots of searches on the 77 communities that make up chicago. that includes hyde park. i've run lots of searches on being comment google, yahoo!. .co. i've run searches on them as well. i have multiple data sets. that's 370,000 links. this is the work of the data that we live in these days. and that's what i've been looking. the question is what do we see. so i calculate the price which is in some sense of number of advertising links divided by the number of organic links. i use that as with calibrating how much advertising. i think that's incredibly crude. so someone limitations. how about the size?
1:23 pm
were at a place? don't do any of that. this is what i calculate. it's interesting for a number of reasons. i think if you ask he was inflicting the highest intensity of ads on customers, and that being and google have interesting differences across different categories on average at this stage, they seem about the same. but i think that's the path we need to go down but i don't think we should think of the dashing think of it as a media product with a charging advertising prices. and someone who's got a quality advantage should be exploiting the court advantage by charging higher advertising intensity pricing. greg talked about his design choices. i think is really interesting. i spent his summer on searching for good restaurants in hyde park. if you been to hyde park you know about the search. but okay, we've got organic links and we know what those look like.
1:24 pm
and the organic links be links what we don't see, they're competitive, people and does a lot and websites to try to build those up. but it's not driven by money. it's not driven by hardwiring or something else. then with the competition with regard to advertising. i am a google advertiser, i'm competing in auctions right now as i speak, i assume. those are the two kinds of things were very good with it, but don't lose sight of the hardwiring that is going on as well. if you can see at the top of that there's a hardwired links to google properties. that's the youtube link or does hardware link on maps, and then we get to hear, the one box as google refers to the craig stadler, i'm not sure that the ftc our focus on the existence of the one box. what they're clearly focused on is the ties, the links to the google review. the google+ site, the big red circle. and how those links are put their we don't really know.
1:25 pm
the kind of organically competition, doesn't seem to be. is i at the hardwired a link? maybe. if we're going to frame it, it's on the ftc i do what they do. achieve path to the ftc is always deceptive practices. google, myspace, facebook, they have been under deceptive practice. you have search engine guidelines, a big single -- circling. i think that's the question. because google review to links that showed up there don't seem to trap the quality of the google refuse. how dwight l.? you can sort of count the number of reviews. we don't seem to see that. but, of course, digi comp to use it will be much more aggressive on the. here's something really interesting i think. so you can take a browse but you can take firefox and you can say i'm not going to be firefox today. i'm going to act as if i'm
1:26 pm
internet explorer six. in such research into. this is what google gives you. i got the same results. the ashley give you a choice, the review sites. and i think what google recognizes is that we are moving a situation where social is going to be really important for search and that in some sense these peer-to-peer connections is what yelp represents. what facebook represents. that's not a space which google has been strong and had to figure out how they move from the space in which they have been strong to a space in which they are seemingly much weaker. they seem to be doing that, the contention, this is what i think today, they seem to be doing that 31 box link. the one box structure is a richer structure than i suggested. so on the restaurant searches that come back with seven links. if you look for a hyde park bookstore, and those we have lots of. the only give you three links. and if you look for hyde park
1:27 pm
hair salons, there's no one box at all. that's something we can exploit statistically. so i can count the number of one box is on my searches on google, my 770 searches. that's what i've done. then i've done what any president who buys the state a license can do. iran for aggression. i don't want to sell these as being the be all end all. i still understand the analysis. i'm shocked at how much better understand today after doing this, but who knows for much somehow i may have a better understand. what we want to look for is that red circle right there. and with a red circle suggests is, in situations where google has lots of its own links and the only google has lots of its own links is if they embed those links into one box. and those situations they seem to have less advertising. they seem to be exercising the market power not for the advertising would would be completely legitimate exercise but they seem to be substituting
1:28 pm
out of that into the google share links. so i'm going to run out of time here but i want to talk about remedies quickly. i'm going to skip that slide although i think it's really important. figuring out how we allow products to evolve, which i heard jeff asking. i think that's an important push. focus on what google does with u2. eric schmidt was very clear in the. he said his testimony response, they treat youtube as an outside property. they crawl index and rank. that's what they could be doing with regard to google+. we don't seem to be doing the. if you haven't seen the browser ballot in the e.u. this is what happens when you turn on a windows sound machine for the first time in the e.u. you get a choice of rousers. there was a resolution that came out of the e.u. case against microsoft. there's some discussion in the paper that we can't share the top link, for after all only one toppling. i think that's wrong.
1:29 pm
we can share very much in a statistical sense. when google sees 10,000 searches for hyde park restaurants it can return at whatever fine level of granularity we want searches that this search is going to be linked to yelp reviews and this will be linked to google reviews. we can do that at whatever level of granularity we want to if we don't think every search return has to be the same. so i think the remedy issue here is if we want to go down that path and have questions about that, questions what the e.u. has done, but i think it's interesting that and i think they're possible remedies here if we think is a proper i don't know whether there's a problem. but i think there's an interesting discussion that we can have. i'll stop there. >> bear with me here. [inaudible] >> anall right, george.
1:30 pm
how are you doing speak with i'm doing great but i don't see nick as dashing am i on? >> the floor is yours if you want to give your remarks. >> thank you very much for your -- [inaudible] okay, thank you. i'm sorry for the trouble. thank you for your very kind introduction of my empty seat. i'm very sorry i'm not there. the washington, new york shuttle is pretty reliable. it may be adis new regulation. i don't know. there were only 20 people at the
1:31 pm
gate at 10:00 for the 10:00 shuttle. they have something to do with it. at any rate, i'm very, sorry, a gay not to be there but i'm happy to be able to participate. google wanted me to state that some time ago i served in a very small way as a consultant to google. they wanted me to stay the. they didn't want me to go on and say, essentially they fired me, or laid me off. at any rate i'm no longer at google and these comments have nothing to do with any consultancy for google. first, i found the paper very helpful, very helpful in explaining how google works from what the matrix of the market is composed of very smoking is available for competitors against google are. the paper, and a recommended to all of you in the audience. i should say i've been watching this session on c-span, and so,
1:32 pm
and the panelists our good buddy spent a lot of time showing the audience. so i think i've seen all of you in the audience, i'm looking -- right now c-span is showing the audience. it's been great. you didn't even give me a seat. they have a side camera. it shows there is no seat there. you took the seat away. at any rate, the paper is free helpful in that regard. i think it's thorough. it's a very useful for thinking about the various criticisms that google's competitors and others have made about google. i urge you all to read it. i have one personal criticism of the paper, and i hesitate. i really hesitate to criticize the paper by bob bork and you, greg, on these grounds. bob bork is a good friend. his family are friends of -- mariella, they've been chewing
1:33 pm
on c-span a good deal of time. bob bork was a predecessor of mine in the chicago law and economics program and, obviously, a predecessor of mine in teaching at antitrust at you law school. but my principal criticism of the paper is that it's not chicago school enough. you know, it makes a good shot at it but it would not chicago school enough. the paper does a good job of knocking down the arguments made by google's competitors. the paper gives those arguments and the competitors too much credit by taking them as seriously as it does. and especially by relying on empirical evidence to show that the competitors criticisms are wrong or outweighed by other competitive considerations. and let me give you a principal example of this. i know most of you have not read the paper but i'm going to read from, this is on top of page 13
1:34 pm
and greg talk about this in his comments. it reads, antitrust intervention could be justified only if top placement on a google search page is an essential facility. then he goes on to say none of the four conditions of the official facilities doctrine is set, and the paper goes on many pages to explain it. this is an essential discussion of these various conditions. control of the facility by the monopolist, the competitors in ability to the facility, the denial of the use of the facility to competitors, and so forth the feasibility of a remedy. each of the individual discussions is actually but it misses the larger point. and this i think is hundred the chicago school view of the world. and that is that the concept of a central facility is incoherent. there's not a lot of literature
1:35 pm
from the chicago school on essential facilities. greg, you've got an excellent article on the subject. maybe the rest until -- the chicago school point basically is that if a facility has become essential, and this can be said of google i think, because it succeeded on its merits, not in a legal sense but as a central facility, but if it's become essential it's because it succeeded on the merits. in the context of a single firm to succeed on the merits is what we want competition. indeed, it's contradictory to the ambition of competition to attempt to regulate success on the merits of that nature. it's different where there's a government grant, with a market power drives for political authority, and that's true of
1:36 pm
some of the facility cases. stadiums, stadium approvals and the like. but if the facility has become essential through market processes, which assures the case of google, it represents the success, and that firm is entitled to all the rewards it can gain. now, greg and bob do a terrific job of showing why the google experience does not think, the scraps of law are essential but i think they should go for the. they should deny that there's any merit to the concept at all. i think this is true of other parts of the paper, as i alluded to earlier, much of the paper is empirical and i learned a lot from it really. but those responses in that empirical detail is basically making the point that criticism by competitors of google's practices are just wrong.
1:37 pm
but i think that that's not enough. especially in representing the chicago school. the feelings of the arguments by google's competitors against google are deeper and that this is the essential chicago school point. they are analytically unsupportable. now, greg has made this point and he made both in the paper and in his remarks this morning, but i think it deserves, or this point deserves further emphasis. and he seems to me to be the central point. there are two vegetable facts i think that are good for evaluating the google position and the google practice. first, as greg mentioned but i think it's a critical point, the search services are given free to consumers. so what is the consumer harm? a search of service is given free. and the second and related point
1:38 pm
is that google search services, whether general search or specialized search are in competition with many other search engines. and both the general and specialized levels, which are also given free to consumers. now, these points seem to me dispositive of the evaluation of google. and i think essential to the chicago school evaluation of google. all of the detail in a paper in effect highly interesting, high development. important to read. as i say i've learned a lot but i think it's a simpler case. these points are deposited. years ago i made, a decade ago i made the same argument with regard to microsoft, internet explorer which is given away free. bob bork and i differed on that. i think that would be useful because bork criticism of
1:39 pm
microsoft with the important i think in the ultimate resolution of the case. but i think for the violation of google, these two facts, deposited facts, should and for the chicago school should in the discussion. googles large market share is a result of superior product that they have created. that has been revealed by the market through the share of advertisers and also of consumers that google has, and that's, should be the end of the story. that is, the dominance of google -- and it's a fragile dominance. as greg pointed out, a simple click of the mouse put you on a different search page. but the current market share,
1:40 pm
however defined, that google has has been gained on the merits and deservedly so. that i think is the chicago, the ultimate chicago school conclusion. thank you. again, i'm sorry i am not there. i've enjoyed watching it on tv. >> george, thank you very much. jennifer, if you don't mind -- so, greg, i want to have time for questions i will give you just a couple of minutes if you want to respond to anything that jeff or george or randy said. then we will open it up for questions. >> i will be very brief. i thought that jeff's comments were very helpful in terms of putting into sharper focus particularly the point on the dynamic aspects of the market. i appreciate it. i think randy's research sounds fascinating. i look forward to seeing the paper when it is ready.
1:41 pm
[inaudible] [laughter] >> i appreciate george's comments about attacking the ideas out, i will call the level of theory as opposed to the level of -- and also it's a real rarity when i don't feel that i'm on a panel to make everybody else sound reasonable. so i think you, george, for that. beyond that though i won't take up more time because i imagine there are good questions from the audience. >> we are at question time so if you just raise your hands, and just a couple ground with. i have some microphones are coming around. when you're called upon please wait for the microphone. if you could just identify yourself, and then also please make a question in the form of a question. so we have one right down here. >> thank you. i'm alexander, and question i
1:42 pm
have is actually for randy. you gave the example of old-fashioned television broadcasting where the advertising really detracts from the product. based on that you said, that's the price consumers pay. but when i run a google search, the one box, the advertising, everything on that page, except maybe you could say the bar at the type top with google's other products is beating the needs i've expressed by my search query. so i would ask you, why do you approach the advertising in that context as being a prize, rather than getting a different kind of service to consumers? >> sure. a couple things on that. we know that the ads are there not because the ads the consumer
1:43 pm
most wants to see, right? we know they're there because that's how i pay to get on the page, right? presumably i wouldn't pay to get impatient guys getting their organically, so it's a change in approach to the competition. but those links are by construction necessary less valuable than the organic links. and in the question is, is what limits, the outages have a similar page after page of ads. maybe that's what the guy. maybe that's what yahoo! has. i don't think that's a common experience in the ads, or the comment expensive advertising generally. i agree, that's interesting. if you think that and i talked about it, i think that changes the analysis. >> we have a question right here. >> my name is mark. a question for greg. you mention is you're switching switching kosovo iowa from google to being. my understanding is that google
1:44 pm
stores information about your past searches to get a better search. if i use the term washington and i live here, it just as i am looking for d.c., not the state of washington. when i look for assertion type of wine, customized for the search, taking into account the knowledge it has. wouldn't that be somewhat of a switching cost? >> that's a fair point that you make. that would get into i think fairly empirical analysis of how quickly the volume of your own individual search is reveals your interests and preferences that relate to replicate the precision of search that you had before. i mean, my own casual experience though is that when i switch
1:45 pm
from google to bing, for example, than one seems, pretty quickly what i'm looking for. i agree that it's something that you could try to measure. it seems like it's the sort thing it would probably require a computer scientist more than an economist bill. >> other questions? over here. just wait for a microphone and identify yourself. >> hi. my name is david. my question is for randy. randy, your comment on your last slide of our remedy, i'm wondering about what exactly -- what exact remedy you're suggesting, so might be possible when you first start your
1:46 pm
operating system in europe to go and choose between the four options of, you know, is this suggestion a lot more difficult from a practical perspective when you are talking about what gets placed at the top of a search inquiry? >> i think the answer to that is no. so what google does daily all the time is there constantly engaging in what they called a be testing. so there constantly saying well, if we do this search response this way, what happens to ever do the search response is where what happens. they contrast those. so the path of approaching this not as a one time situation but approaching it statistically and actually seeing and observing the response is, if we put yelp your does that change the behavior. if we put a link to bing it doesn't change behavior and observing that over and a lot of searches, that's actually seems to me a rich space. i've questions about the whole
1:47 pm
approach, let me be clear about that. when you ask for data, they say no. and that's going to be a live -- given across microsoft has really had with the browser about. i've questions about about that but when i guess i see it as response to come instinctive response which is the only one top box from nothing to be done about them statistical over many searches that's not true. the question is how do we exploit that. spent randy, it let me ask a crush on top of that. how do you pick the top for? and arguing precisely -- on to entry precisely into the problem us doing to the status quo question on take them on the basis of some imperial measure about who is entitled. so you define an element to property rights in one case, on the first screen, and then microsoft, and in this case on the google screen. >> you're absolutely right to say the browser valid case they
1:48 pm
have 14 browsers in that ballot. i did know there were 14 browsers. i have three or four on my computer. so you like to say, but it seems to me which one had to do there is come you're going to evolve that remedy as you see effectively people competing to be in those. i don't think you want to entrench that. you clearly don't want to do that. but there are other spots for competition. that was sort of your point. i don't disagree with that and i think you're going to drop on the competition was about to go to pocket the spot. not necessarily pushing that, but my forecast is that's what e.u. is going to have. >> i think the concern is can you design that algorithm in a way it doesn't -- where it isn't a foregone conclusion. if you on the list you've got an event. if not on the list you don't. spent time with greg, the algorithm -- [inaudible]
1:49 pm
>> okay. do we have other questions? don't be bashful. i will take moderate prerogative and asked gregor question. based on something that jeff indicated which is that there are facts that can concede the could change one's perception of whether that there are antitrust problems. as you are doing your research and going through this, we do things that you said well, it would be useful for me to know x, y or z so i could do it is going to the problem? or you -- or could you envision things where the antitrust bar would be hurtled?
1:50 pm
>> i think, the way to add your question, the issues that i thought that judge bork and i thought were most important with the ones that we outlined in the paper. so beyond those it's hard for us to anticipate technological issues or issues relating to software and the like. i do think though that, maybe to bring it back down to law and economics. i think that the question of remedy is one where it's possible to ask, are there additional facts that might bear on the feasibility or the un-feasibility of certain kinds of remedies, working at all? i'm particularly concerned about
1:51 pm
the design of a remedy that envisions some obligation for google or the next google to provide some kind of service for which there is no consumer demand, simply because the regulators at that is what was necessary to compel the company to do. and there was certainly that problem with some of the e.u. remedies with respect to microsoft. the bridge to nowhere. >> if you've never seen the numbers, as you may know on the e.u. side, when there was a case about the windows media player and they required microsoft to issue two versions of windows, one without the need for and won with a. it's amazing the number of decimal point you need to go out before using any market traction on one without. so a completely failed really.
1:52 pm
where we are, to my knowledge, not public. >> do we have it any other -- a hand raised back to. can you just wait for a microphone. >> my name is kent, and i wanted to pick up on a theme that jeff announced for us about dynamism, and ask why is it that we don't see new entrants, if one answer to a quick is because there is market power. there are other answers, and perhaps just discussion of platform competition as part of the answer. but i wonder what we do not have awareness of these 14 browsers and searches and these different platforms. it seems there are two or three that no new entrants. >> great, do you want to -- or
1:53 pm
jeff. >> well, i'll go first and someone can lay in nonetheless question progressive. in markets like the markets were talk about her, almost invariably you have a dominant firm, a fellow named jonathan has done some interesting research in europe over the past couple of years which directed by looking at the concept called stack over at equilibrium. and how that applies to markets like this. the essence of it is when you because a steal and network effects, the amount of variety that you have in the market any given time is a function of heterogeneity both a production site and and consumption side. so, you know, we have had persistently to operating systems, significant operating system providers in the u.s. for
1:54 pm
20 years, apple and microsoft. their market share, apple is not right it would have been remarkably stable. why didn't we go to one? we didn't go to one because apple was able to distinguish itself sufficiently, that for some set of sunset consider it was officially support them even though it didn't enjoy all the network effects that were enjoyed by microsoft in terms of size and applications and so forth. and economies of scale. it was nevertheless able to resist because the fight proposition of specialized capabilities using music editing being one of them. you know, why don't you see more entry, why don't you see more changes in market leadership? there i would refer you -- the essence of that i think is that it turns out the market leaders do innovate rapidly.
1:55 pm
and they have something of great value. they realize they've got something of great god and they're under a lot of pressure to continue innovating to when they fail to do so, american online is an example, they do go down. but once you get on top of, once of, once you get on top of the mountain it's easier to stay there. i just want to if i can backup a briefly, you talked about his of the question of is there any set of faqs. i can do on a different side from where george and i'm not sure where everybody under came down, on the microsoft case. if you want to envision at least envision what is a different set of facts look like, go back and read judge jackson's decision on effects in the the microsoft case. and what you'll find you can agree with it or disagree but that was you'll find what he concluded is there was a range of behavior well beyond just the browser, a range of behavior all of which had -- fits squarely into the pattern which has no
1:56 pm
value for consumers, the legitimate purpose and was explicitly based on the inside documents that microsoft at the time designed to harm competitors who microsoft hadn't thought of -- marking -- knocking it off the mountain. judge jackson concluded that it was. but it's not at this point, none of those facts are in evidence in this case. and i would agree can people go back because it's a pile of facts that you had come all of us us didn't get over that very easily but when you read that pile of facts, and someone i thought that --.net. >> a number of things i guess. that was also interesting. they are our site is some direct market entry it out and how important it is. the paper talks about it which is, duck duck go predicting billions of searches and they're playing very different strategy. interestedly different strategies. so when there's a paper you can be debt. but it's worth looking at.
1:57 pm
that's one. i think where the truth of the matter is where we see the interesting entry that really matters, typically not directly in the market but in a related adjacent market. so the e.u. for that microsoft leverage its monopoly over windows to a media player monopoly, and that's why they took the steps they did. we not that played out. we all use windows media for today and carry around -- we know what happened. apple was able to enter in an adjacent space where mark a soft position on desktop didn't matter so much and look what they've built that into. so the point where adjacent market entry takes place, that's what i think a critical point for antitrust decisive because it's so hard to attack directly market. that's why what jeff was saying about the microsoft case and internet explorer is so interesting. if you go back and read bill gates internet tidal wave memo, gates understood that there was
1:58 pm
this powerful indeed in this adjacent market that put them at risk and they responded. and that's what judge jackson found a parallel here, if there is one, is the idea, search is going to involve answers and that's what greg describes an judge bork describes and that's what we think is going on. at the same time the adjacent market spot of entry is on social side, peer-to-peer site. and that's the spot where google has not been very strong, and the parallel is, is google has tried to take traditional position in search and move into this adjacent market, very much are they like what was so with regard to internet explorer. >> i just add that there's an incredibly disruptive competitive effect as firms like apple or google add an additional function of our service to their platform.
1:59 pm
the previously was provided on a standalone basis by some other buggy whip manufacturer. and so i mean, look at what happened to the recording music industry, for example. and i think it's important not to lose sight of how that can be a significant kind of innovation itself, not just some new technology but the inside of combining something like a cell phone with music. suddenly you have this device that generates tremendous consumer value that didn't exist before. it hasn't shifted from desktop to the handset. >> we are out of time so i want to thank you for joining us today. i know that we made copies of the paper available to people, but if they want to find it will have a link to it. i think at the aei event, but you can also find it at criterion economics.com. if you go to that website. so thank you for joining us
2:00 pm
today and join me in thanking our discussants. [applause] .. [inaudible conversations]
2:01 pm
[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]
2:02 pm
[inaudible conversations] we need to tackle our nation's challenges before they tackle us. we need to save and strengthen social security, and we are putting the ideas on the table on how to do that. we are not going to try to scare seniors, we want to save them for seniors and for my generation so that these promises are kept. they have laid out clearly they say that with barack obama and joe biden they have in the injured medicare. they stole money from medicare and they have done to get obamacare and you see in the ads and you hear in everything they say nothing can be further from the truth.
2:03 pm
>> this gives us a great insight look into what is happening in washington so whenever that happens it will come back to you and change the view so it's different in regular media because it's very objective and it shows a lot of what is real and what is going on. >> i watched the hearings on c-span and when the senate and house votes on the bills we watch in the office and when the
2:04 pm
supreme court has hearings we watch different decisions and opinions on c-span. a discussion now with the mayors of massachusetts and ithaca new york. they spoke yesterday on the future of american democracy at georgetown university berkeley center for religion, peace and world affairs. this is part of the millennium value symposium, which consists of a series of panels focusing on democracy in the u.s.. this is about one hour and ten minutes. >> i would like to hear from all of you and, you know, last night when we think governor romney talked about states as the laboratory of democracy while that may have been eight
2:05 pm
republican versus democrat, and it got me thinking about our mayors and what they do in the community. and so i'm going to hand the floor over to them so you can dhaka little bit about how to see the future of american politics from where you sit. >> thank you for having us and all of you for coming to this event. i do believe that the politics are local and as the mayor i've had the opportunity to witness decision making on local level that i think has implications for the state and the federal government. i will just briefly talk about my background how i first got into the position as the mayor in a small city about 40,000 people outside of springfield in the western part of massachusetts. i was born and raised there and went to the public schools and when i got into brown studied urban studies there and unlike a lot of folks my age to give back to the city that i thought had given me the opportunity that i
2:06 pm
had. holyoke is a rich history and is the first city to the committee to make papers we are the paper city. like a lot of cities on the northeast we move the industrial city but folks came in to holyoke and a lot of the factories moved overseas. the unemployment rate is larger or how your domestic and national average about 50% of the population is latino and mostly puerto rican defense and very diverse city as well. so i got elected last november and there's four of us in the election the nonpartisan from the local level to start against each other in november and i went with 53% of the vote and became the mayor in january at the age of 22 and i turned 23 and i will be 24 in january so i
2:07 pm
quickly getting up there. [laughter] it is a very stressful job, but also very, very rewarding. there's nothing more special than being the mayor in a city that you were born and where your family still lives and your friends are there and the school he went to, your teachers come and i still teaching in the public schools given my age i've experienced superintendent as my principal in high school. so it's been a really rewarding experience and we are focusing on four different issues in particular as education we have about 53% graduation rate over four years, so like a lot of the large urban centers around the country we do challenge them on education and at the graduation rate and economic development like a set trying to comfort the industrial city into an economy run the innovation and technology the computing center sponsored by harvard mit and northeastern massachusetts and that's been a catalyst for other economic development in the city
2:08 pm
and a lot of folks asked harvard mit place something in holyoke in the cities in the state until i was left of the campuses and the answer is the cheapest renewable energy in all of new england. then we have the marketing tool to bring other companies and the system and focus on the downtown arts and innovation district. public safety obviously my job as the mayor is to be the chief marketing officer making sure we are standing the tax base creating jobs and we need to convince people it's a safe place to spend time with your chinley and friends and at of community policing strategies that improve the relationship between the police officers and the residence and really making sure that we then took a sense of pride. the one thing that has been the biggest challenge is our perception so we're beginning to telling a story about holyoke that we are more than a city of problems and challenges that a city of opportunities and
2:09 pm
possibilities and like my election it made a big statement for the cities we had 15 member council on the committee and a strong mayor of government. i ran against a 68-year-old and i was on the council of the congressman with a very maintaining and supporting the status quo moving in a different direction, so holyoke is a very postindustrial city to elect a 22-year-old openly gay person to the mayor's office i think really send a strong message about what our city wanted and what direction we wanted to move into, so i just want to thank you ulin ann i look forward to your questions as well. >> thanks for being here.
2:10 pm
it really is a pleasure to be here. as new york senator chuck schumer comes by and i don't know if you're from new york you probably rank as a the most dangerous to place is to be between chuck schumer and the camera. he comes walking into the room, looks around and says what? i'm the mayor of ithaca. i don't understand. i was elected. how does something like that happen? >> i think that's actually the question i get most often is how
2:11 pm
do they do that? it's that i can assure you. you know, you really -- what people actually want to know is why on earth what would convince you to run for the mayor that you could put yourself out there and part of it is coming from my story it's not even the least likely part of my own story born and raised a part of my life in poverty and mama raised four of us children and a pretty tough condition to get us off to college and i needed to cornell university. anything could happen. you believe in that sort of american dream that anybody that works hard can accomplish great
2:12 pm
things. with that of delusion in mind when i was a junior high was working with young people and i was in the tobacco advocacy say you have to excuse me if i am out of breath i got dropped off in the wrong town, i've got to capture it quick. you go to the city council meetings you make a decision you want them to make and after awhile you start to think why don't i get to make the decision? so, i ran for the city council when i was 20-years-old and i1 and four years later i decided that instead of running for reelection i would like to be the mayor.
2:13 pm
the laboratory and democracy the sort of front line democracy to get tested and actually put in and we can see if it'll make a difference or not within 2,009 back when i was a young man. we have smoking in public parks, outdoors, and outdoor playgrounds and spaces in the comments which are for a controversial and very radical and the following year the mayor did the same thing in new york city said he is welcome for that you can do these on several to become city level to be affected by that decision and stick to them. not with children and not
2:14 pm
rhetorically you don't have to get their attention for this long. there's a final number of people on the city can grab and hold on to their attention, and what's more you can't score political points by being mean to people and going home to your home district which happens in the city. the person in our city you got to see that and run with. or you're going to see them in the coffee shop i know that person. lawyer utility nist of causing problems? you are held to a higher standard you have to have worked on because there is no place to retreat to. if we are to be successful in fact our entire government for democracy is going to be
2:15 pm
successful. it has to be because more young people get involved and not just because i am a young person that because i have seen through my work on the city council but our system that we desperately need. in fact convinced the first is energy it takes an inordinate amount of energy beyond what you ever expected. 14, 15, 16 hour days they will never make it and i know it doesn't feel like it on saturday morning. that's because you don't go to bed until 5 a.m.. if i don't get to bed until 5 a.m. i don't wake up until monday. the second thing is creativity.
2:16 pm
honest to goodness this is something you see a 6-year-old playing and all of a sudden they say i am of dinosaur but they believe it in that moment in their mind so radically change the status quo. they have no attachment to the status quo. alternate worlds and possibilities are real to them and that's something that we lose and as we get older and sure you've that people in your work. there are two things they are not allowed to say to me. they can't say we've always done it this way and everyone else does it this way. they mean nothing to me because there is no attachment to the way that we've always done it. that sort of creativity to give an example of a couple years ago i sold my car because it and if
2:17 pm
the cow we call this conscious outside of it to call it a happy to veto hippy but just last week we were the number one college town in america by people that rank such things. so when i was elected to the mayor i had the best parking spot in the city which is in the heart of our downtown. so what are we going to do with this? to court benches we were not using any more but we cut down. we hired and place them and put flowers in it and created the smallest part in the city. the mayor's parking space. automatically it changed instantly the way people felt about how much they squeezed the cars, change what's possible on a small budget, and changed the way people protest the decisions
2:18 pm
or they take away the parking spot. we've had a couple rallies and the trends are right there. that kind of creativity, and the last thing first is energy and sick industry to become of the last thing is a sort of moral authority and unambiguous sense of what's right and what's wrong and what's fair, and it's not true for everybody but a lot of as the older we get the more we lose that. that same 6-year-old that was a dinour if you try to takay a lollip frould you dohypcawt us are politically engaged to wod and most of write off if you don't participate in the elections it is just a lazy but they are in this democracy with us and i think that while we may still be pressuring them to and we think
2:19 pm
about other ways for this democracy we believe that elected officials make a huge difference but there's also a lot more going on, and coming to the symposium and looking at other millennials and other parts of the country, i read about this taking place called the engagement center, very similar in north carolina to the knight foundation, and millennial pitch ideas. there was a conference for grandfathering and they have ideas to get their communities more severely engaged for their increasing volunteer program and rallies or teaching students how to better engage in their communities. it's what the millennials are doing but if we hearken back to
2:20 pm
last year it was a bit more alive or even 2008, 2007 when there were strides for young people to get out the vote. i think it's important to not forget that everyone here in the country with or without paper, with or without a job, with or without an i.t. we are all living here together. we often go to school together so for those of the star politically engaged it's important to think about how to incorporate everyone. i think hearing from as many people as possible whether or not they are citizens is really huge. if we want to improve our community? i don't want to improve my own to the detriment of others but the if the figure out of so many of the millennials are disillusioned now how else can they get involved?
2:21 pm
i don't think that just because there is a sense of disillusionment with elections that means a total withdrawal from any participation in the community that thinks that's an interesting challenge they can work on, and i assure you see this especially working with education and dropout rates boating was very important but it's not everything in for a lot of people i don't think it is the right avenue. >> you just made such a great point about how a lot of people don't vote because one vote after 40 years what does that do and you are not landaluze by one vote and that's true when you voted irregularly you would to the minds of people that think about running for office who are running for office even before they get elected. so does it become accountable on
2:22 pm
the national level below local level you must ask them to print out a list of registered voters and from this list it's how many times you voted and which elections and also has your age and gender and where you live. from that there's software in our data with a butcher the people elected and in the demographic profile. it's amazing. but what you do is take that list and go out on the street. and if you are in a real hurry, you just go to the people who are likely voters, people that vote all the time. if you are trying to be very thorough you can go to all of the registered voters. if you are extremely thorough you vote on every door. most people are not extremely thorough, you knock on the door and people are likely voters.
2:23 pm
they can hold attention for an hour and tell what is going on in the life and what they want to see fixed. these taxes, those regulations, these schools. the people that are not on the list are invisible. their doors never get what on -- dhaka knockedon. the people that you spoke about some immigrants from a poor, people of color, you can end up in a lot states and it is no different. you can end up walking past an entire block of people and then they become invisible to the government. we then wonder why some neighborhoods don't get the same level of service that others do. it's not just because it doesn't throw it is because it never entered the consciousness of the government. >> sunday elections are won by one vote. on one by one vote last september. september 20 at and i got 23
2:24 pm
votes the incumbent mayor got 22 and the other gentleman up 80300 is a winning the preliminary by one vote everyone was coming up to me telling me they were about one vote. so what we did, we printed t-shirts that said i was the one vote and sold it for ten bucks of the campaign fund raiser and the thing about that is a lot of the new folks voted in the microthe elections than two years earlier so everybody is coming up. my spouse, my partner, wasn't going to vote, they got me to the polls and i didn't know who i was going to vote for and that's why it gave us the momentum over the next set of weeks before the next debate congenital election and the one vote was in the story of civic engagement and the election focus on getting people involved particularly young people in the latino community. folks often said if the young people to come out quote the canellos extension of the latino community will come out and vote, but again i won the
2:25 pm
election because on average the middle class folks in the community were to get out and work for me and that is just a realistic practical look when candidates look at who is registered to vote and who is not in a while we spend a lot of time to expand we have to focus on those that we know are going to get out and actually vote. >> there is a neighborhood in ithaca and everybody thought the turnout was up there how we going to walk away to the election and in that 35 people in the voting. so, you know, and we did more, we targeted them more than any other race in history. >> a great conversation and we need to add another voice to it. >> it is a tough act to follow and i want to thank you the
2:26 pm
mayor for giving me the opportunity to be here. it's sort of a funny story i would say. we were sent an e-mail singing these are a series of events and a subsequent e-mail said you have the opportunity to talk at one of these with and i think 20 minutes responded to this and i would want to follow the curiosity since he was actually elected and i was very curious that the opportunity. i am entirely serious about it. [laughter] and then i got last night at dinner we were like c-span is going to be there. this is just getting better. check this out. [laughter] i'm going to be on c-span. so, my mom is watching, probably the only person watching but nevertheless -- there you go, so it all begins at some point.
2:27 pm
but i think one of the most important things to me stock or that was failing in the remarks that were made is opportunity within a democracy is what sort of mixed a democracy with the character of the democracy the character of the regime and we often forget in the united states the way that we divide politics and defied the government's is the different layers, we have levels of governments federated in the public to which the local is arguably in many ways the most responsibility. this is the fact that dawn on me in numerous respects. i'm from the south bronx. you know, the community where a lot of stores don't get knocked on. the community where the walls have been carved in certain ways to policies the were made decades prior to the present and many years in the future would create the lines in the sand for
2:28 pm
sort of representation you have and what access you had, so to me these issues are pressing but yet in a very similar way, i benefited enormously from my own community where i was raised and my family and my environment. to me what the value of phill local is for the value of the city -- and very partial to urban environments. it is sort of a basket of opportunity. i look at public schools my whole life, and it was from like the teacher that set you might like doing this and spend time after school, kind of introduced me to the next opportunity to someone that sat after school with me and went through different topics or that i didn't understand or my debate coach in high school to spend an extra $6 per week coaching us. these are all things that i've not made the character of my life and this all happened not by way of large institutions,
2:29 pm
this was my local experience, this is what i found and you hear that an actor victor division of the cities or the urban environments to get lost. there is nothing in personal but this has not been my experience that the local represents and to return to what i find being cities and local politics and local institutions are on opportunity. human potential your closest to the human potential access you can touch that, you can shape the lives of so many people in particular young people in respect of the view is that we hold about young people and irrespective of the realities with respect to their voting the reality is the you cannot escapes this. they are the electorate. 20 years from now they will be the older demographic. they will be the adult, the
2:30 pm
grown-up. it's a marvel to me that this hasn't sort of dawned upon all levels of politics and for me i think that opportunity exists with a local level and to be sitting on the stage with folks that sort of have done what i could aspire to and have great passion for. and sort of a mild electric i would say that chuck schumer selected as one of the people there and it's the fact that he forgot that -- >> he didn't forget it. he let me know by the week. [laughter] he said the fed is not so tough. just out of law school. >> that's right. so, anyway. you lost me at harvard. >> you didn't get in either? [laughter]
2:31 pm
>> he appreciates the upbringing in that respect, but this is harkened back to the same point reiterating that local politics of urban politics are the center for democracy to the greatest amount of opportunity i would love to hear other people's comments but that is the importance of governments. >> great. thank you you. i will pose one question to you and then i can tell we have got people ready to ask questions already. one of the things you often hear interjecting is the media and technology. we heard earlier today on other experts in the social media sites are the village square for the civil debate and discourse so it's curious to hear from both of you how you are using the social media and technology campaigns but now also to relate
2:32 pm
and contact with constituents. >> i think to some extent it might have been some time that if i don't put on facebook is it as if it didn't happen. so, there's almost -- it is politically important that we have the announcement out. some basics like ten different exciting things to put out but we have to choose on facebook within half an hour you want to comment in the light. i think my picture with the president and michele last december got almost a thousand likes. i wouldn't have won just giving social media. we won the election because we paired new forms with more traditional forms which is door knocking to have a conversation in their living room and about the issues facing them and their family. that is what put me over the finish line. we had 89-year-olds saying they've lived in holyoke their whole life and not once did a candidate ask them what they
2:33 pm
thought about the city or the education or the economic development and that was probably the most important thing that we did, and it is scientific to get your target your voters and you don't know how many they need to win on election day and you get them all to vote. at the same time, i think to piggyback on the door causes of people being able to read the opinion about something is incredibly important and it becomes even more important what we have been able to do as the mayor i can't do everything. we have our checks and balances and the school committee and most of the time unfortunately. so, often times when there's an important issue we need to go to the city council chamber and insure we get the ability to pass the budget and one of the recent things i did is creative director of the creative economy in the city to focus on the cultural tourism. somebody that gets it in the morning thinking about how we can connect hour our action and
2:34 pm
hospitality and fashion and film. as we seek to embrace a new type of economy in the city and a lot of the folks on the council didn't know what that meant and nor did the public so we had to educate folks about what that meant and we ended up getting 11 of the counselors in favor of voting for that. in january i think my first week my cells over the high point to the confirmation was up for a vote from the city council and what i did on facebook is tomorrow night the candidate that i appointed will be interviewed and take a vote tomorrow night. can you please speak in her favor and we got her friends there and family and people that didn't even know if so when you pass this city council people are scared to vote against the folks that show up. and it becomes less about whether you agree or disagree about wanting to appease the people that are showing up, so for me whenever there is an important issue before the city
2:35 pm
council, posted on facebook and try to attack the room and get the council to know this issue is important to you and also three basic things. being the mayor when you leave the city hall last night, you are still the major when you leave cingular at the cafe or the grocery store or the weekend on the trip and people would know you are the mayor and they would ask you anything in the city oftentimes on a daily basis in number of messages about potholes or wanting to get new sidewalks or the bus didn't pick up my kid on time this morning and oftentimes the even posted on the wall so if we don't respond people you don't respond. suspending part of the day call this number, this is what you need to do, and is also refreshing for people to have the constituent service come in different ways like that. obviously people call the office all the time about interesting things as you can imagine, and my assistant is actually here today and she takes much of the constituent calls and that is also 23. so people figure they will
2:36 pm
balance it out and i said i would hire my -- we know each other since high school and, you know, so it's been a great experience to bring these younger people went to the system, and also get to know folks that work for the city for 20 or 30 years and worked hard for the city and have the new energy to work towards the new goals and oftentimes we pan people together in the city government that they are they're feeding of the taxpayers' money and not doing the job and one of the things i learned in january is people that work for the city are incredibly hard workers and oftentimes they don't make enough money are cops and firefighters. anybody that has been there so long cares deeply about the city so it's also an honor to work with those folks as well. >> i would say that it is the social media world is a different world, so you can't expect it to correlate exactly with what people care about. one of my biggest challenges when i took office in january was closing the 3 million-dollar
2:37 pm
budget deficit for the next budget deficit for the next year. and to give prospective to close what has taken a 15% tax increase or we would have to reduce personnel by 10%. that's 40 of 400 employees will have to let go. so, for the last ten months it's been my largest haul. i've been working every day on this budget to come up with creative ways to increase revenue and try to come up with creative ways to reduce cost and we did a laundry list of initiatives. i proposed my budget proposal for the next year and would close a 3 million-dollar deficit and a 2.7% tax increase. four percentage points below the average in the last four years. that got about 12 weeks on facebook. [laughter] i went to the white house and
2:38 pm
got 500 like some facebook. [laughter] this would be a hit. sure. >> they must not be reading it. [laughter] >> but it is as a tool. so the important conversation is about power we actually going to fix the city. we have to have face-to-face and when you actually have somebody's attention, you know, they can give you their attention and you can give them your. they replicate to that, but the reform to share information and sometimes allow the dialogue to happen. especially after i got elected a special thing happened. if you touched on it in the public square. in the public square where i know if i want to join the conversation immediately. i was with the traffic engineers to fix one of the intersections
2:39 pm
and we drafted something up and it was technical. it was an engineering draft so i drew on the white board. simple. left turn lane, intersection here, immediately. some of it was, you know, . he would get people fighting against each other. like if you think a left-hand turn goes there, you must be worse than mussolini. [laughter] he was talking about a turn signal. but it's to allow them to happen and the traditional media particularly the local papers for the use to have three people to cover the city government they are not going to have a full-time person. it gets harder and harder for people to get news about what is happening in the city. my pager and might witter page have become sort of clearing
2:40 pm
houses and i think it is a terrific thing. i try to model actually after my hero and a guy that is mentored me over the last ten months, cory booker. if you ever go to his river to the coat reuter people say the meanest things to him. he is like the coldest member. i honestly don't know how he does it but he answers it all himself and you can tell him because a lot of it a staff person would never write. [laughter] you know, the typos and that comes through and i know that he has turned a lot of the cynics in to believers. >> he has time to save people from burning buildings. he ran into a building and pulled a woman out.
2:41 pm
>> tough to compete. >> thank you you. any questions in the audience at this point? we have a couple microphones. if you can wait for the microphone we will do it up front here and then in the back. >> from george washington university, i have to pick and choose my questions here, but a leader cannot go at it alone, so to engage all project and realize your vision, what do the existing networks due to engage and what do you make sure to include in your leadership and this is for the mayor. >> that's a great question. i think there are many ways to do that all local level in particular. i mentioned before i've had the opportunity to shape a team of department heads. my director of economic development, the solicitor journal, and oftentimes you have an opportunity to appoint these
2:42 pm
people some of confirmation and some not so we wanted people that know more about the subject and i do and will challenge me and the people that are respected the most would tell me i think this is the wrong way to go when going to let you know because i want you to make an educated decision that is going to affect the public so folks worked out for the best city i think are important and sometimes leaders are sometimes intimidated by having people smarter than them or whatever it is around them i think that is the way to go to have a good team. i don't have time, obviously to do everything, to every economic development project to figure out whether or not a decision i want to make is legal for the city ordinance for example or i don't have time to fix the sidewalks but we have to have really good people and experts in the field and the department head positions and that has been the best experiences getting
2:43 pm
people in the economic development into the first puerto rican solicitor this well because well as speak the language of the people who live in the city but you have to be able to build coalitions and it goes hand-in-hand with transparency be yet the conservation commission, you know, folks, the same people in the commissions for 20 or 30 years and on the campaign we talked about we need to get new people on the commission's. and oftentimes the term would come up and they would be reappointed so for the first time in a long time we would send a press release this person's terms expired we are looking for new applications and not to my surprise that other people's surprise we get dozens of applications for people who want to volunteer to be on for example little local level volunteers have a lot of power to make decisions about projects so we have a new big ride coming into the city have to go to the
2:44 pm
conservation commission and planning board which they don't get paid anything that they want to give back to the city. nothing against the people on the condition for years but it's not fair to your neighbor for example who's been wanting to be involved in the municipal government in some way so people open the door to this cahal, be more transparent because we have such a high population we have been able to partner with our community college to provide free spanish class's to employees and firefighters and police officers because something i noticed in january is not enough of the stuff and the city hall are bilingual so we want to make sure that opportunity is available for this stuff. oftentimes we provide a vision for the city and we rely on our department heads to make sure it happens so it is really important to have good people around you. >> i would agree with that. particularly when you are choosing staff. you've got to figure it out when
2:45 pm
it you are the dumbest person in the room you know you are going to come up with a good decision. if you are the decision maker and the true that he's smarter than you you are in a good place and that is what i try to do with my -- one of the most important decisions you can make is your legal counsel city attorney. i chose a young man who i thought i was getting the smartest attorney in the city and i ended up getting the smartest one in the state. she's something else. it's amazing how small decision like that, out of a couple dozen that you make every day, the decision to get the best person that you can will pay off every single day because of the work that he's able to do. i think another thing you have to do is be aware this takes a lot of self awareness. you have to know where you're blind spots are. i talk of the strengths the young people bring in a joke with the staff what i lack
2:46 pm
experience to make up for in ignorance. i couldn't do that? okay, sorry. but it's done now. while that can sometimes be a strength that can also be a weakness. so finding groups as i've assembled small groups instead of one cabinet i have several that i meet with monthly that give me advice and in put and come from different areas of the community and with different perspectives. sometimes beagle well and sometimes they are like arguments. but the decision comes velte on the other side and what leverage works to use to attract people particularly when we do also have about three dozen volunteers in the city to help us cover, and we are looking for younger people averages 20-years-old, 20-years-old.
2:47 pm
we need to find a way to get young people and people of color and poor people. facebook and woodring is a great way to get applicants. but what skills can you use to keep them motivated and keep them? one thing i try to do is you know i have a vision for the city and i carry that vision every day when i wake up and every day before i go to sleep and think about what i'm going to do that today and how much of my time is spent advancing the city and its lease 60 or 70% of money to spend more time. but if there is an idea that helps advance and at least distract us from that, people who are smart and hard-working,
2:48 pm
my staff for city council or a member of the community come to me with another idea or an initiative they would like to start or project the would like to start working on. so your instinct after a while because you can sort of get, you know the will say no more new project, no more ideas. i aspire to whatever possible as long as it doesn't distract from where we are going and try to get to yes to read what the word is they want to try to get to yes and be supportive because i think when people can see themselves following division that they have for the work they want to do, they are going to still medicated and keep working hard, so, this is another corny thing but we said no botts. we want more yes so if you are a no butt person you are not welcome. if i come to you like we have an
2:49 pm
idea. no, but it won't work for these reasons. you can say yes, and we are going to have to think about how it needs to be and we are going to have to think about yes and think about enforcement and we have to think about the cost but when you begin to know it relations people down and the motivates people so we try to get yes and, and no butts. [laughter] >> there was a hand in the back. yes? >> so, first off thank you all for coming. i can wait so my question may be redundant. also, just special attention to mayor myrick underscore no class -- cornell class. fantastically to represent read. the rest of your cool, too. [laughter] my question is being younger people in the field of politics
2:50 pm
in the situations where you don't control things in terms of when you are forging bonds with other series with like the state level, how do you really overcome more towards the good old boys network? that's very much extinct, it's still there and it's a force. how do you especially being so young and yes you have the azilian youth and academic background but you don't necessarily have the experience so how do you counter that and especially with in some situations it is amazingly infuriated. >> well, i would say quickly being five years now and to my ebook experience, you sort of learn the backslapping that gets a little more comfortable. you learn the names and faces. but honestly, as much as the age can keep you out of the network also brings in the tension that
2:51 pm
is positive to the city. they know who i am in the capitol because they remember that young charming mayor. [laughter] they actually say the boy mayor in ithaca. but they remember the meeting because it's a bit unusual. what was unusual about it is the person that was asking is younger than you are used to sew it gives a special not particularly when they are governing the whole state or in d.c. the same is true. but yes when you don't have 20 or 30 years of political connection, you haven't been donating to campaign for haven't been active in other races of this time i could you just try to play to your strength and part of my strength when it comes to the average strength of
2:52 pm
the city as being unique. >> i completely agree with let and maybe before i got elected, you live in holyoke? why do live in holyoke? o you have that young a year in holyoke to read it changes the view of the city overnight which the positive attention given to the city and high expectation for me as an individual of whether i like it or not and for the city, and i think the political adversaries or people who didn't vote for me or in elective office that i may not be their favorite they recognize there is tension on the city because of my age and it's a great thing obviously when you are elected you have the support and the vote of the people and most importantly people respect that whether or not they voted for me. so 53% of the vote and my goal is when i run again next year to get more than that, to be able to win people over and you want
2:53 pm
to be will to win people over and it is a challenge and it is an exciting challenge to have people who may not support you but you are in the position now that you can make a bigger difference. to think i wasn't on the council before i became the mayor i was campaigning and came back and the entire city against the other folks the first published in the politics and i think people recognize my election was unique and people wanted something different so they sort out folks on the city council or just folks in general in the city it gets tiring after a while. we want to support the mayor to let his vision be realized and there are some city councilors. the german for example that has been a big supporter of me and make sure we get him the tools he needs to succeed his budget reflect his priorities, so i found while there are people who will be opposed and who will never vote for me it's about the
2:54 pm
people and keeping in touch with the people and when i am having a bad day or politics is sort of discouraging me in and offered for example you just remember what the outside and have a conversation with somebody walking by who says you are doing a great job and i voted for you and remember meeting you last year. for every negative story in this job there are ten more of people coming out to you who thank thau for what you do. it's not about the people that have the money and the people who are effected in the area that get you in there it's the people that for you, the average folks you don't see every day that are going to vote for you and support you. ..
2:55 pm
he didn't win the primary, so no longer a part of that. my question is : how do we keep millennial into the national political scene which is, it may not be, as you said, the forefront of the politics, but it is where more and more things are getting decided. foreign affairs is a huge swing now, so how do we keep engaged in involved. a constant cycle when if you are not keeping our litigious band, which is very short, we just shut down. >> one more year. >> polarization is a word that
2:56 pm
gets tossed around a lot when talking about american politics. and i hear from a lot of people my age that the two sides of our democracy spend the entire time fighting in no time actually fixing anything. i wonder what you guys would say to someone my age. moving toward. >> i find that to be one of the frustrating arguments. they say, i don't vote because politics is so toxic. that's like saying it's too polluted. and that's going to plant a tree. who fixes politics? to fix this government but us? if you believe that politics is toxic to register to vote and vote for whatever party for whichever candidate is not being in this-obstructions.
2:57 pm
the point about millenniums. like a said, even in my race, two years of college, the campus community was certainly aware. we've registered hundreds of them. they justin show up. i think part of this, when we talk to people who really hear the stories, they volunteer for campaigns. they're running for office. many people end up running for the school boards or city council or mayor because sometimes some years ago we tried to get it. i understand exactly how government affected them. i got hooked on it. the problem is, sometimes it takes quite a while. eighteen and 22. you have run in with government.
2:58 pm
it doesn't happen until you are in your 30's and you notice exactly how much is getting taken out of your taxes each week or your mortgage or you have kids in the trying to send them to college are you have kids in the ask about the war. retire and he starred the alliance's security or medicare. a lot of the things that lock people in and get them to focus on how doesn't happen until later in life, but if we did a better job, the effect as early in life, letting people know, was head start important for you? was free less important? did you take the school bus to school? letting people know that all of these things that we saw, we think it was a part of a world. they run. police officers are just there because they're there. if we do a better job of letting them know that people making decisions about these things,
2:59 pm
people making decisions directly impacting you, that's the stuff that gets them hooked on voting, not because the kendis school or because it's an election year. they stay hooked forever. >> politics are polarized. the degrees thing about being mayor, of the time it's not partisan. so the great thing, obviously there's no democrat or republican way. , weekend -- we have to balance the budget. it's very basic we have to do as mayor to solve problems that you don't see on the state and federal government. when you look at polling nationally mayors are oftentimes the most popular politicians compared to congress and their 14 percent approval rating that has gone down. and it is different because as mayor you can solve problems. sometimes you can sell them an hour, sometimes too. my mentor, former mayor is now in congress. he says one of the things she misses most about being mayor,
3:00 pm
someone calls and you can give them an answer and solve the problem and it's over. constantly politically toxic environment where you cannot get anything done and sometimes it may feel like that and the local level, but one thing that was always surprising to more people vote in a presidential election than for their mayor. and i understand why, but at the same time more people should come out and vote for their city councilors and their chief executive officer in the city because it did not matter so much to is in office. the number of the decisions that come across my desk every single day, the number of people at a point from it matters to is in the positions. oftentimes they make decisions that affect everyone in the city, and if you don't have a voice york -- you're missing out on an opportunity. to your question the, enthusiasm and politics, nationwide we have lost an opportunity, just using our system to instill in young people the importance of civic and government. we become a country so obsessed with standardized testing that we don't focus anymore on our
3:01 pm
court civics and government and community service, something have talked about since january commanding community service, things like financial the trustee, making sure their people now have a balance a checkbook. just things that, you know, huge implications for our community and families, and we don't talk about that enough him especially at the middle and high school level. as a basic things are we need to start installing in young people in a non-partisan way the importance of being an active citizen in your community. >> real quick, i, to people who think -- so disillusioned with congress and think that especially national races, they just can't have a say. if you can get those people interested in voting in national elections, there's that and local elections. town hall meetings, volunteers. so many things and a local level that have a huge impact that people pass up, and i, again, not quite sure why there is some much more focus on national elections where arguably it
3:02 pm
could be hard to have your vote for your voice heard loudly. at think there are a lot of avenues, and people who don't vote in national elections should not just be cast aside and totally ignored. >> to you have any thoughts on keeping millennialism days? >> is a question of the hour. i think that with the mayors, it's a matter of bringing politics to the individual in a way that is meaningful. and we squandered opportunity in that sort of utilizing the k-12 education system, education, you know, many opportunities to get them civet the involved. you're right. the means of assessing people, but in fact, these don't really resonate well with what one does in a society are how we participate. i do think creating a participatory democracy is useful.
3:03 pm
i wrote in mind -- for this program you have to read a statement. but i wrote about was in many ways the ways in which the people to vote are somewhat antiquated and annette -- anachronistic. we go to a poll. high-school, what have you. the pro we don't get off of work, off to school. and it seems sort of in contrast with the array of other very important tasks that we take. we pay our taxes on line to monday finances online. we do an array of very important tasks that require a great deal of security, yet we don't utilize those for the most important part. and to me it seems that on one and recently have to get people simply involve boring days to plan that is kind of bread and butter. on the other hand we have to use and exercise the tools that are available to us. i think that we talk a lot about social media, but just the basic things, such as the internet. i assure you a younger person
3:04 pm
will feel more inclined. >> that is a great point. >> we are running out of time. two more questions that will have quick answers. >> no promises. >> how about this lady here. to ladies. how about right there. >> i'm elizabeth a question about diversity. the mayor's both spoke about how they were trying to increase. there were talking about initiatives they had taken at the city level. was wondering if there were any more initiatives that the city would take -- the cities were taking to increase diversity and 35 at the local level. >> well, we sort of you that on
3:05 pm
two different levels. diversity within our organization, city employees, staff, volunteers. i try to recruit a diverse array of volunteers. also, we have something called the work force diversity committee. a committee that has changed our hiring process but also changed our ongoing training process is so that our employees are always getting the fresh courses and exactly what it takes to work in a diverse government. and a lot of times a reminder of what diversity means. a lot of people. diversity. they think -- there are not thinking about the full spectrum of ethnicity, nor the full spectrum of diversity. it could be religion. it could be sexual orientation. it could be -- a lot of our departments are not very gendered averse. our fire department, for example, almost entirely melt. almost entirely white. and so we continue to struggle
3:06 pm
with that. we want our organization to be a reflection. and we really believe, i really believe the infrastructure is an invitation in so many ways. a small example. the parking space to an invitation for what might be turning into a park. as people said to have lunch and get together. how we choose to develop our city, where we choose to put housing, where we choose to put what kind of housing is also going to be an invitation. so if we put low-income housing on one side of the city in high-income housing on the other, then we are enforcing a segregated community but if instead, a million-dollar loan for the city of ithaca and support from the host of other agencies. we have a not-for-profit, of five story apartment building,
3:07 pm
55 units that is actually mixed income. reno how affordable housing works. we make sure. so one-third of the apartments will be market rate. a third of the apartments are going to be for people who make 80 percent as the median income or lower command a third will be for people making 40%. and they're actually going to be a sign departments on a first-come, first-served basis. it won't be the wealthiest touch with the nicest. people will actually be living close to each other and downtown where there aren't the most number of people anyway. we tried to this of the environment. and you touched on a great point. talk about if you ever want to see exactly how it -- what the city can do for the larger social and cultural and economic trends, with the city's planning and infrastructure development, you should read a book called the power broker by robert moses. yes.
3:08 pm
i'm sorry. buy rubber roses. by robert. and possibly could also read jay jacobs work as well. and you can see exactly, the local level and they have a larger impact on banks like diversity and access to opportunity and access to employment. >> that is a very important point, and i agree with mostly everything that the marriages said. also, in terms of access to food to maxus of transportation, we have for downtown neighborhoods, holyoke kutcher joe, the flats. this by means of that's a were doing a public investment, $14 million public library in $8 million senior center. for example, just the decision of where you're placing an investment in the projects to make a huge impact on people who live in those neighborhoods. also building our cities first skateboard park that will be done next summer for our cities young people. we are investing a quarter million dollars and a skateboard park and putting it downtown. this is is that does make a huge difference for people who live downtown. a few weeks ago we were in the
3:09 pm
process of bringing back our holyoke revolved authority to assist a revolt in office and we have to have an ambitious urban renewal plan. just a few weeks ago we announced in a renewal plan that connects our downtown neighborhoods announced the restoration. it will be coming up to the knowledge corridor and making sure people access to transportation that they can walk to restore, things -- we have never heard in our city where people can't get healthy food. the mcdonald's is the closest and cheapest thing to where they live, and that is obviously a problem and something of a local planning department has to deal with, not something the state and federal government can do alone, but then they give us recesses in grants to do that to assist us to come up just make sure that we have people in those positions that care of everybody in the community. also diversity of the staff, i talked about before. i remember when i first ran for office and set i'm running for mayor, that is where the latinos live, but enough ground to come out and vote anyway. really have to focus on the city if you want to win the election. and so we rejected those
3:10 pm
sessions from the beginning to register new people to vote, not on every door and just it made a difference. and, you know, the fact that i am the first mayor to speak spanish speaks volumes to the spanish-speaking community in the city. i remembered door knocking. a white guy with gray hair. he not speak spanish no one's above the door. i'm either crazy or a moment. and just to be able to speak in someone's language, they will immediately open the door and you can connect with someone like no other. that is why it was important for us to offer spanish class is an important for me now to hire the best people, but people who look like a community, people that they can relate to because this is not a onetime thing more of a sudden latinas indian people are voting. it is a process. obviously when i am up for reelection we want to make sure that some of the steps that we have done to have a more inclusive government really made an impact because of fun to happen in one election, maybe not too, but three or four down the road, hired voter participation -- participation
3:11 pm
rights. those are really important, and even young people nationally. it will not take one election. we will take a change in the institutions and the way we talk ruttish used to make an impact. >> i promised one more question, but we're running at a time. i don't know that we did short answers. that would like to thank both mayors for being with us as well as mohammad and rachael. it has been an interesting discussion and i hope it has provided some insight for the audience as well. thank you very much. [applause] >> here's a look at our prime-time lineup tonight on the c-span networks. here on c-span2 at 8:00 p.m. republican national committee chair takes part in the 25th anniversary of the gala hosted by the media research center. this ceremony is a roast of liberal media reporting, and you can see that tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern again, here on
3:12 pm
c-span2. and on c-span, president obama talks about the september jobs report released today, saying that the encouraging numbers show that the country is made too much progress to turn back to the policies that he says led the nation into an economic crisis. those remarks came a campaign stop today in virginia. you can see his entire space and adding 8:00 eastern on c-span. that will be followed by republican challenger mitt romney in a campaign stop also in virginia. during his remarks he said the drop in the nation's and upon the rate to 78% is not what a real recovery looks like. you can see those remarks at a 30:00 p.m.
3:13 pm
something that absolutely i could barely believe. when you question someone more personal, more prevalent than their politics, religion, sexual preference. something that goes to the very soul. you bought that? >> sixty minutes on his career at cbs. walter cronkite and journalism today. sunday at 8:00 p.m. on c-span q&a. next week the supreme court will
3:14 pm
hear oral argument in fisher of the university of texas, a case that could end race conscious administration policies in colleges and universities. the think tank century foundation released a new report from promoting using class status as an alternative to race-based policies in college admission. affirmative action advocates and legal scholars talked about the report, the feature of diversity in universities, and whether it is possible to achieve diversity through race-neutral administration policies. >> good afternoon, everyone. thank you all for coming. my name is richard colombard, a senior fellow at the century foundation, which is a small think tank with headquarters in new york, and we have a small office here in washington as well. it was founded in 1919 by edward filene some of you may have visited. i want to recognize the president of century foundation who is here today.
3:15 pm
the report that we are going to be releasing was co-authored by me and halley potter, a research associate up @booktv is as yet of the century foundation who wrote the back part of the airport. and in a case of mixed up priorities, decided to go through with a wedding rather than be here today. but she contributed enormously to the report, and i want to make sure that she is a novelist so i have been studying the issue of affirmative action for about two decades. to my mind the central conundrum is that most people of goodwill wants our universities to be racially inclusive, and at the same time many of us are uneasy with the idea of counting race in deciding who gets a head.
3:16 pm
moreover, there are some liberals, like me, lori that the narrow focus on racial diversity in higher education has eclipsed larger issues of class and the quality among colleges and universities. and so and advanced u.s. supreme court oral argument in fisher verses the university of texas, which will take place next week, the century foundation put together they're report which i am going to allied which led to the question, is it possible to create racial and ethnic diversity without using race and instead paying attention to these larger issues of economic inequality in our society. so the report that we are releasing today is called a better affirmative action, and
3:17 pm
it makes three main points. the first is that racial affirmative action is likely on its way out. affirmative action based on race was always meant to be temporary by the original -- those originally envisioned it as a deviation for a. away from the nondiscrimination principal, but now they're both legal and political forces that appeared to be bringing affirmative action to an end. to begin with affirmative action is highly unpopular among average american voters some. if you look at the supreme court's amicus brief in the fisher case you would look -- you would think there is overwhelming support for affirmative action as the number of briefs that al line higher education, business officials,
3:18 pm
civil rights groups that allied support for the use of race and the university of texas, swamp the number of briefs that are in opposition, but if you look at the broader public opinion, it appears that only about one-quarter of the u.s. population supports the idea of racial preferences in college admissions. by contrast, you will see in the second set of figures, the blues set of figures, there is quite broad support among the very same set of voters for preferences in college admissions based upon income. now, given these it is not surprising that we -- lord -- ward connerly has been extremely successful in his effort to ban affirmative action based upon race in a number of states. so far, those efforts are five other six times voters, when
3:19 pm
given the option has said we should end racial consideration in college admissions and public employment. including blues states. the second major problem facing affirmative-action is the legal issue by -- which will be joined in the fisher case. many people expect the u.s. supreme court is going to occur tell or even eliminate the ability of universities to use race and emissions. this is this issue before in 1978. both times by a very narrow margin. the u.s. supreme court upheld the use of modest racial preferences as the only way to achieve a rate -- racial and ethnic diversity.
3:20 pm
i suspect it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative-action program in a racially neutral way and have it be successful. demand the impossible. in order to get beyond racism we must first take account of race. there is no other way. but then texas, the university of texas found that there is another way to create racial and ethnic diversity. and as this figured -- said the figures suggest in 1996u t austin continued to use race and emissions and had a black and latino representation along the line of 18% combined. in the next year, 1997, the university of texas was banned
3:21 pm
from using race by a lower court decision. they saw some decline in racial and ethnic diversity use and socioeconomic status alone. by 2004 using socioeconomic considerations and emissions and what is known as the top 10% plan where students who are graduating the top 10 percent of high schools are automatically admitted to you see austin, you can see that racial and ethnic diversity we are clear and airport the part of the reason there is racial and ethnic diversity in 2004 is the latino population grew in taxes during that time drama. as a policy matter it's fair to say that texas ought to be
3:22 pm
pursuing other race neutral methods of increasing racial and ethnic diversity so that it more closely mirrors the state population. as a legal -- legal matter the supreme court never allowed racial balancing with respect to statewide population. instead, what they said is it is okay to use race to create a critical mass of students in quebec -- the critical mass of underrepresented minority students in order to provide the educational benefits of diversity. and you can see from the last figure at the university of machine law school where they did use race and admission had a lower level of -- they considered 14 percent african-american latinos to be a critical mass. much less than what the university of texas achieved through race neutral means. so i think this goes a long way
3:23 pm
to explaining why most think that the u.s. supreme court is likely to strike down the use of race at the university of texas. now then the second question we take a panera port is, what should replace race-based affirmative action? if it in -- and fact is -- if it is struck down by the u.s. supreme court. and in our report we look at nine states where because of either the author initiative or executive order or legislation universities have stopped using race in admissions. and to their credit, they did not give up on diversity and said, we want to try to find other ways of achieving racial and ethnic diversity. these plans are hardly perfect, but in many ways i think they're better than the old style of race-based affirmative action. so you can see that in our analysis, creating partnerships with disadvantaged cesspools and
3:24 pm
ordered to increase the pipeline of low-income and minority students. seven of the nine states provided class based admissions preferences. a state's spending their financial aid budget in order to provide support for low-income students of all races. in three states universities drops legacy preferences, those preferences that go through the children of alumni. disproportionate share of whom are white and upper-class. and three states are rewarding students who did well in their high-school is irrespective of test results. to my mind these are all noteworthy efforts that we ought to apply, and i wished that higher education had more generally adopted these types of programs. in fact, in 2010 the century foundation published a book decrying legacy preferences and call that affirmative action for
3:25 pm
the rich. very hard to justify, and so i think it's a positive note that the states have taken some of these steps. in particular i want to focus on the class based admissions process. if we want a system of the missions that is really fair and bureaucratic to look at only at how well a student as academically, but also what obstacles they had to overcome to achieve the economic record. and you will see that their research is clear that today this advantage is far more likely to be based on economic status as opposed to race. so this is a steady from anthony, a valley in 2010 which looked at what predicts it students s.a.t. scores in a looking at a large national database. and he and his co-author found that if you are socio-economic disadvantage you are expected to score 399 points lower on the
3:26 pm
s.a.t. with a math and verbal. by contrast 56 points. seven times as large as the racial obstacles if you want to reward students who have beaten the odds we ought to pay much more attention to the socio-economic status. you can see from this picture
3:27 pm
that in seven of ten cases he was robber. aeg austin, texas a&m, university of washington, florida, georgia alaska and the university of arizona. the representation of african-american and latino students met or exceeded their representation prior to the ban on affirmative-action. there are three exceptions to this rule. did not garner the same amount of racial and ethnic diversity. what is notable is the three universities other ones that are most likely to draw on a national pool of applicants
3:28 pm
likely to be depressed for an artificial reason. these are the schools that have to compete with other schools on an unfair playing field. competitors who are free to continue to use racial preferences in admissions. a highly talented student of color he gets into uc-berkeley with other racial preference is also likely to be amended to an even more competitive institution like stanford is not surprising as the receipt of uc-berkeley, ucla are having a harder time achieving racial and ethnic diversity than some of these other institutions would still not end to the same extent drawn national poll. what about graduates jack ray
3:29 pm
sanders is here from ucla law school and all your little bit from the program that he said the letter. ucla has of strong program of providing a leggett to economically disadvantaged students. you can see in the data that if you look at african-american students 22 of 63 under the socio-economic program, the economic disadvantage to students. compared to only 12 out of 382 who were admitted through other programs. that is to say, more african-american students were admitted through the socio-economic program than the regular program even though the
3:30 pm
socio-economic program a much smaller. overall, if you look at the results that ucla law school, 56 percent of the students admitted through socioeconomic affirmative action or black or hispanic compared to just 6 percent of those not admitted through those programs. now, how would this work at national -- nationally? private and public universities. the century foundation sponsored research which looked at that question and found that if grades and test scores were the sole basis for many students that african-americans and latinos would represent just 4 percent of students at the most selective hundred and 46 universities in the country. using economic affirmative action, we would boost that number substantially from 4% to 10%, which is a little bit lower
3:31 pm
than that 12 percent that is achieved through race-based -- race-based affirmative action. now, importantly the author -- this is also a study done by anthony, volley. they found that if you define socioeconomic status using some additional factors not included in the study such as wealth as opposed to income, such as neighborhood poverty levels that the results would likely yield even greater numbers of african-american and latino students because african american poverty is in the aggregate different them by poverty and african-americans are more likely to live in concentrated poverty than white americans. because of our history of slavery and segregation, that wealth is much -- is that a much smaller ratio to white them black incumbent. soak blacks make about 60 percent of whites make.
3:32 pm
their wealth level is just 5 percent of what whites make. so the idea here is that if you had a class based affirmative-action program that is quite sophisticated in its way of analyzing this disadvantaged you would see even more positive racial results and this. we would also see, of course, much greater levels of socio-economic diversity under an economic affirmative action program. according to carter hawley's analysis, 12 percent of students would come from the bottom economic half of these selected institutions if grades and test scores were the sole basis for emissions and reality justin percent come from the bottom economic. the economic affirmative-action programs that the model, that number would increase to 38%. now, the third and final part of the report deals with responses to criticisms about class based
3:33 pm
affirmative action. although many of them are addressed in airport, i just want to highlight to. the first is the question of, well, if you admit large numbers of low-income working-class students, will they be allowed to do the work? would they be able to graduate? and according to the analysis, the answer is yes. you could increase the percentage of low income and working-class students both from the bottom socio-economic half from 10% to 38 percentage and still see graduation rates of the selective institutions, actually at a slightly higher level than we see today. and their results from texas also confirm this. people were concerned that kids admitted under the 10% plan would fail out in large numbers, and that turned out not to be true according to research.
3:34 pm
okay. the biggest question i always get is why can't we do both. why not provide a leg up to economic the disadvantaged students and to underrepresented minorities at the same time. and including, you know, my friend his research i have been selling, that is his position. we had to do both. and i think that is possible to do in theory, but in practice it is almost never done. universities have been saying for years that they consider economic disadvantage and race. in fact, the research suggests that they provide almost no consideration of socioeconomic status. let me cite put the three studies on this question. the first is, it -- i'm sorry. i stick to slide. they found that the boost of the
3:35 pm
missions and selected colleges for african-americans is on the order of 310 as 80 points. working-class students by contrast, 70. bump. africans, 130. bond. and this is actually the one that found the biggest blow for low-income working class students. william, is strong supporter of affirmative action, of fellow president of princeton found in his analysis of selective universities that being an underrepresented minority increases once chance of admission by 28 percentage points. that is, if 50 percent chance of getting invest in your academic record. you would have a 78 percent chance based on the racial consideration. by contrast, the bottom income quartile. his research also found that affirmative action based on race essentially tripled the
3:36 pm
representation of african-american and latino students, but they form the bottom economic half and receive no bump up and do a little bit worse than if grades and test scores were the basis for preferences. the one -- so here finally is -- these are the results of what we get at the respective institutions under this idea that universities are doing both economic and racial affirmative-action. 74 percent of students come from the richest quarter of the population, and 3 percent from the poorest. in other words, your 25 times as likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid on the nation's selective campuses. well, that -- there are exceptions to that rule, as i was setting earlier, those universities that are banned from using racial and ethnic preferences in admissions. they don't suddenly care about
3:37 pm
socio-economic diversity, but they do about racial diversity, and so they will use socioeconomic status as a way of indirectly promoting racial diversity. now, let me conclude by saying that there is a very proud history we ought to provide some sort of compensation to african-americans given the egregious history of discrimination, slavery and segregation in the country. but then instead of advocating a bill of rights for african-americans, for blacks, he instead comes out in favor -- as many people at the time were doing, many civil rights leaders were calling for racial
3:38 pm
preferences, and he instead called for a bill of rights to the disadvantaged. concedes that -- king suggested as a simple matter of justice and america in dealing creatively with the task of race should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white core. so it seems to me, the irony is that today it may be that a conservative supreme court decision in curtailing the ability of universities to use race and ethnicity in admissions could actually bring us to a better form of affirmative action that at long last addresses these issues of economic inequality. thank you. [applause]
3:39 pm
>> a senior fellow of the center for american progress, and i will serve today as the moderator for our panel discussion. by way of sort of framing in setting an hour conversation, i just wanted to have a very brief set of remarks. just the mere mention of the words affirmative action is guaranteed to start an emotional and political fight. addresses, a sure-fire rallying cry the the front lines of support for a specific programs. and for conservatives, the same is true, only in reverse. they love to attack affirmative action through our defense's so-called color blind policies. often lost in the middle of these divergent and polarizing arguments is the ultimate goal of achieving equality for those who have been shut out of opportunities. from its inception by president johnson to the 1978 decision in their regions of the university of california verses mackey
3:40 pm
outlying -- outlying quotas to the 19 -- to the 2003 decision in a farming affirmative action policies at the university of michigan. the practical implementation of affirmative action is a patchwork of legal impressions about how best to make amends for the nation's past practices of legal, racial inequality. regrettably, the tuberous surrounding the affirmative-action debate has taken of that debate. the real ideals for affirmative-action have been some misconstrued over the years that it helps to look back and to see why it was been deemed necessary in the first place. the widely misunderstood quota system or grossly mischaracterizes as reverse discrimination against white americans, affirmative action was originally an acknowledgement that american society was changing.
3:41 pm
in the post civil-rights era black americans and white women increasingly challenged educated white males to into the exclusive citadel's of higher education and job sites. an accommodation to the new realities of american society had to be made. those adjustments for affirmative action programs were sought to bring fully qualified blacks and women into places that they were restored the excluded from, often by legal fiat. for about a generation and have roughly spanning the mid-1960s to the turn of the 21st century affirmative action programs have divided america. expanding black american middle-class, political strength to the first opportunities afforded by federally backed affirmative action programs. immigrant newcomers have seen their influence and prosperity rise as a result. of course, women have been among the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action policy. meanwhile, the conservative backlash seized at the atf of
3:42 pm
tax dollars going to what many perceive for undeserving minorities and worst, white americans expense. most recently the supreme court ruled in a 5-4 decision three years ago a farming and a white firefighters claimed that there were victims of this reverse discrimination in the city of new haven connecticut. next week the supreme court will take up fisher -- fisher v. the university of texas, a case that challenges whether applicants race can be used as a factor in granting admissions to an effort to diversify the student body. and that brings us to today's discussion. we gather here today with the distinguished panel to discuss the future of affirmative-action although affirmative action is a hot-button topic and, as i mentioned earlier compassions tend to run amok on the subject -- when is the subject of debate but i am hoping to do a better job than jim blair and promised to keep our conversation several
3:43 pm
and on topic. i am sure that most of you are already very familiar with our panelists, and if not, you have their biographies in your hand out, so i won't insult your intelligence by reading what you can read for yourself. i do, however, want to save our way of introduction the joining me today are debo adegbile, acting president and director of the naacp legal defense and education fund. want to come up and take your place. look -- ward connerly co-founder and president of the american civil rights institute, lani guinier, professor of law at the harvard school of law, richard sander, and you have already met richard kahlenberg of the century foundation. please welcome our panelists. [applause]
3:44 pm
by way of getting a started, i'm going to ask if each of our panelists will react to rick's presentation and the information contained in his report just as a way of getting a starter for our conversation. we will start with mr. connolly. >> thank you for inviting me. i was very impressed by the report, rick, as well as your presentation. i recall very distinctly when i graduated from college in 62. the anxiety that i had about entering the workforce and wondering whether i would be given a fair chance to apply and be hired.
3:45 pm
a year later affirmative action came along and the anxiety that i had was quieted substantially because i thought that i would get a fair chance. that same anxiety is there today for a large number of students who since the demise of race- based affirmative action. so i think it is fitting that the century foundation released this document to kind of quiet people who are wondering about where we go from here. make no mistake, it is not an across-the-board substitute. many will tell you that there is no substitute for using the more direct routes of race, having served a 12-year sentence on the board of regents, i can tell you that many have the -- many of my
3:46 pm
former colleagues certainly believe that there is no direct substitutes and clearly racism -- race is a more efficient way of doing it. it is not the most morally acceptable alternative, but it is the most efficient. the thing that really was a moment of truth for me while i was serving on the board was when the chancellor told me that , without using race, the university of california could not compete with stanford and harvard and yale for underrepresented students. and it dawned on me that this public institution was moaning about its inability to discriminate in order to get minority students to the campus. and i felt that if we are trying
3:47 pm
to help students who cannot compete on their own, race should not be the doorway through which students enter. and so here we are at this moment time wondering where we go from here. and as a society, we certainly want to make sure that we maintain access for those who otherwise would not have that access, and i think that low income students, low and moderate income students who have never had a parent go to college, they are the ones that we ought to be focused on, not on the basis of race. we had to know that the day would come when race would no longer be acceptable to our rapidly changing, multiracial society. and that think that that day is here now, and i simply hope that this better way that the century
3:48 pm
foundation has offered to us is widely embraced and promoted. i would offer a word of caution. we should not make it appear that this is an across the board swap for race-based affirmative-action. it is not. and we don't want to the baggage of up with all of the bag is that affirmative action and race-based affirmative action has right now because in very short order it will suffer the same -- that paradigm will suffer the same problems that race-based affirmative action has garnered over the years. we ought to do that because it is the right thing to do. public institutions should be helping those students who have no other access, and we should not delude ourselves into believing, as i said, that it is an across-the-board substitute for race-based affirmative action because it is not.
3:49 pm
thank you. >> i am delighted to be with you on this panel, and i am a little surprised because there is at least part of what mr. ward connerly said that i agree with. we are. >> wrigley and the other sides of these issues. let me begin with some points of agreement to share one important point of disagreement. first, the disagreement. i think that it is particularly dangerous to talk about rights and race in america as a matter of polls and our constitutional system is developed in a way to protect minorities and to protect us against certain incursions' on those rights that we have seen and that have run throughout the course of our history. the constitution has been amended to do this in important ways, and it is part of the structural understanding of why we have a constitution and why it is imposed in the way that it is. so the idea that polls tell us what the answer to these key
3:50 pm
cleavages in american society are i think is a little bit misguided. me tell us something about where people are, but the first thing you want to know is what is the question that was last. i think, although there is lots of getting permission in the report much of which i embrace, i think their is a particular danger in framing this is a matter of a poll. to the parts about which i agree no serious person would disagree that we need greater pathways to opportunity for those who have experience socioeconomic disadvantage. if we are to believe in the american dream and the ideals that we hold true, then there needs to be class permeability. where you start does not need to determine and should not determine where you finish. and i think that the concept has been embraced robustly. at the data that you have shown and asserted in your report ballistics me back in some way to college because it is a very lengthy and well marked report that we have to digest her
3:51 pm
quickly to be here to speak about it today. this conversation will continue. thank you to those who got me through college so that i could chew it up rather quickly. but the idea is that i cosign that idea, and if i were to ask everybody, there's nobody that is not going to raise their hand in this for more our audience at home, hopefully, that would say no, america is against that idea. i robustly embrace it. the difficulty i have is that you argue essentially that you have found a better path to the destination, and the remedy is to blow up a brace that also can do some things of importance, and so here i agree with that piece of what mr. ward connerly has said. it is not an across-the-board substitute. he makes that argument for a different reason. i say, we need not blow up the bridge in order to do more for socioeconomic disadvantage and also the continuing racial cleavages and our educational
3:52 pm
system in our housing system, and opportunities to jobs and the like. all of these things shape that pathway. a visible path and opportunity and what our colleges represent. so that is one core concern that i have. i take your point that at least some colleges have not done a great job of doing the socio-economic peace, and to that i say, let's have that conversation, let's have the conversation about doing more, and one important factor is the cost of college, which is part of a broader conversation. there needs to be a way to get there, and i think it is multi cheered. the balance that i see in the way of socioeconomic disadvantage, for some people it is too hard to get there from here to mind if you're thinking about coming from humble circumstances, even if there are loans or other things available, it may be beyond your experience or your family's experience to take what is, in effect, a mortgage on your brain that
3:53 pm
seems to be at numbers that are beyond anything that's your family has experienced, so i join you in the point and the objective, but what i say is we should not step away from this importance opportunity to expand racial diversity on college campuses which has lagged. the next observation that i would make about the report is that some of the data where we show that after affirmative action has been taken away at seven major universities, there is a return to previous levels of diversity. that presumes that that starting place was, in some way, a reasonable measure of diversity in the first. and when you drive down into those numbers and when you look to see what their representation was on campuses, and let's not just make it hypothetical. let's talk, the university of texas. there was a window where texas was in the mode, in effect, when there was a decision that struck
3:54 pm
down the consideration of race in the fifth circuit court of appeals. it arose of the university of texas. .. and the dialogue. martin luther king -- if i read his writings on her life and
3:55 pm
life's work -- did not say he did not embrace color blindness as an illusion that should be grabbed. he articulated it as an aspiration we should seek to achieve in the context of laying down the burden of segregation, of exclusion, of violence and as a constitution and a society where we had promises and practices. there was a great lie that we were living. and that many judges, legislators and individuals across the country were cosigning. in that context, martin luther king said we need to do something else. we need to look to what we can be and increase the promise. so he was able to make two arguments. he was able to say it's important and poverty is also important. his teachings didn't stop there but he maintained both of those
3:56 pm
things at the same time, so i don't want be presumptuous, but i dare say that if dr. king were with us today, he would say don't blow up the bridge, let's build a better pathway to opportunity so that we can have the process permeability on sharing the american dream. >> it's an honor to you today. let me say a couple things about where i am coming from. i've been involved in several things and i've learned i'm very passionate about those issues. i'm also pretty passionate about empiricism. i think it's important we do social experimentation and have programs we care about we evaluate them and try to be careful about the fact that we are choosing to read the report
3:57 pm
in this area moves us down the path in a positive direction but i have some qualifications of some of the details of their findings and analysis. let me start by saying where the reporter is right. richard is dead on that in those cases where they are not constrained by law racial preferences are pursued almost the total exclusion of clause considerations. it's not close, it's not like it's too-1 comments 15 crusco one or in some cases even the - socioeconomics that is where as racial preferences or large. they're typically two to 300 or the equivalent thereof or high school gpa is equivalent to a 4.0 so we are talking about large preferences.
3:58 pm
these have big consequences. it's absolutely right to say the there is an imbalance because if we look at the problems in society, more and more plus seems to be a driver of the outcomes and opportunities than race. if we look at the social mobility of black children who are born in these circumstances they now compare quite favorably with other parts of society whereas the economic mobility has trouble the last 40 years and the economic equality has sharply increased. so, there's great reason for concern that the focus on race is increasingly out of sync with the social dynamics of american society. now i don't want to be misunderstood at all when
3:59 pm
suggesting that somehow economic inequality is color blind. it's clearly with a special phenomena. the facts are far worse off than whites who are poor and it's important any kind of class based remedy pick up that sort of account it definitely does do that. we need to think of the intersections of race and class, but we also need to recognize that we have succeeded in creating the opportunity for upper-middle-class born into the circumstances. the life chances are radically different than they were 50 years ago. it's also a civil the true and very important that i agree completely and all of the evidence is very strong to this point that the clause based preference systems can work. in other words, it is possible to do a remarkable combination
4:00 pm
of things with class based preferences, and i think from experience because 1997 via lead the school of the foreign developing class base system and in the year we went from a system where the median income was $95,000. it was 48,000. to assist in the parents of the students about 80% in the direction towards requesting american society as a whole. we are able to do that using small preferences than we have used on the ressa system that we used in the top tier and we had better academic outcomes for our students to read the clause that we admitted and 97 went on to have the highest broadcast rate in the history before or since. so you can do pretty remarkable things. but you can't perform miracles and part of my problem in the
4:01 pm
report is that there's a certain element of suggesting it's possible or it's a little hard. we had a significant drop in the racial diversity in the part of what was because we were competing in the market and it was pointed out the schools the national markets have more difficulties mntaining racial diversity than those that have more but there was a trade-off there was aware i depart from on some of the conclusions i think one is that it's important to recognize cut we can't underestimate the size of what we are doing now. rick put a slide of the difference between the s.a.t. gap based on class and based on race, and i was pretty surprised i saw that. i went back and i reran the numbers and it's correct the
4:02 pm
racial gap on the s.a.t. scores and in a particular strain of this is so economic status is about two points and the clause that i think is smaller than this. it depends on how you define all these things. >> we look at all the different factors. >> people's academic >> people's academic ability is the dewitt proxy for the circumstances in which they are raised so you can get the effect down to zero but that's true for the socioeconomic status and measures so my point is that these things are more comparable in size so if the racial gap was so small i don't think we would be having a big battle because we would be using very small racial preferences but we are
4:03 pm
using very large ones. something to keep in mind is that if you look at the charts in part three, the results that are achieved after one moves to the reforms don't seem to move the bar up and down that much. they are just barely shifting. why is that? i think it is because of the inertia and the agenda in many situations i suppose the emission systems it turns out that they are not really flying after the changes in effect. it's very important in the review we have to have transparency and have to be able to see how the schools are waiting the different factors. that's true with the outcomes of
4:04 pm
students are, and to keep in mind in the racial dividends it's not i don't think possible to simultaneously get rid of the racial preferences issues and says you economic preferences and the size of the preferences similar and improve the outcomes that we had before. that is asking too much of any system however cleverly designed. and let's keep in mind that when the schools are faced with these constraints there is a strong tendency for them to try to manipulate the systems as possible i think jeff is coming out with an article this week about the system the the university of michigan adopted after the the consumer research was to figure out how to pick
4:05 pm
out through the other data points the students the would be admitted in the program. that is what the neutrality means in the situations, and that's not going to get us where we would like to get in terms of the increased socioeconomic opportunity. i will stop there. >> thank you you for the invitation to participate in this conversation. i would like to take the conversation to a higher level of consideration which is what is the purpose of higher education in the first place? we are talking about who can get into the institutions of higher education, but we are not really talking about what is it that we expect from the experience of having been at a state university for a public college, and the reason i suggest that we
4:06 pm
think boldly about the mission of higher education is that right now we are allowing ourselves to get caught up in who deserves to be part of an institution of higher education and a public institution in the same way that we are having a conversation in the larger society about who deserves to vote and those who can come up with a voter i.d. are the people that deserve to vote and those who can't then shouldn't. my point is the experience that we have all talked about in terms of the race-based affirmative action is one of my co-authors and i call the miner's canary, and we mean for ensure all of the people in the audience were born it used to be
4:07 pm
in the mind was too toxic for the minors because the canary had a fragile respiratory system they would give way as a signal they would gasp for breath to signal something was wrong with the atmosphere. the solutions says not to fix the canary and outfit it with a gas mask so that it would stand this atmosphere in the mind. the solution was to do something about the atmosphere so that the minors as well as the canary could survive and i feel it is this conversation we're having today is a little bit where the people of color particularly blacks and latinos are the canary in the coal mine, and then the white students are the miners and we are debating who are we most credit to in terms of staying in the coal mine?
4:08 pm
frankly i think a much larger question needs to be asked what is the mission of higher education in america? what is the goal of the public institutions? is it to admit people in the highest test scores which by the way correlate not with your performance in college or law school, they call it a much stronger with your parents and grandparents income or clause, so i've done some work at the university of pennsylvania were right given access to the s.a.t. scores of all of the students at school and above a certain minimum score, you couldn't show any relationship between high scores and a better grades in law school and that is at a time when csat was between 20 to 48.
4:09 pm
if you got a 45 or more it was completely random or virtually random if you knew someone's score you could predict the first school with the university of pennsylvania 14% of the time to read if you knew the score as you could predict the second year law school grades 15% of the time. that means 85% of the time you would be wrong. and we're talking about the llc tea or csat as if that is a fair and independent way of measuring who should go to the institutions of higher education when in fact and putting the work of tony who has been referenced by many of us, he has done some really terrific work, the point is you're talking about marriage and preoccupied with the merit idea to hire the
4:10 pm
test scores this is an opportunity to rethink higher education and what is democratic mayor at. what is it that we want our graduates of college or law school or ph.d. programs to be able to do to or democracy. is it simply the got the highest score therefore they should get the largest so they would have to make a lot of money and that is the purpose of tire education for the purpose of higher education to learn how to solve problems collaborative flee, creatively, innovatively as that is the mission of higher education that is certainly one of the things i would say is really important that we are training future leaders and these leaders have to be people who can solve problems,
4:11 pm
creatively, collaborative lee and these people need to be able to get along with lots of different people in order to achieve this mission. that means that diversity and these institutions is not simply to benefit the individuals who've gotten into these institutions, the purpose of diversity is to benefit all americans by bringing to institutions of higher education, people who had been denied opportunity for hundreds of years, and that includes four people of any color, and use the institution of higher education to help train them so that they can become leaders and democracy to help us solve really tough problems. so, just to give you an example of what i am talking about, and this comes from scott prayed to beat dupage at the university of michigan. he says if you are trying to
4:12 pm
decide who to hire, he and you have three candidates and you get all of them at test that is what we've been talking a lot coming you give them the l.s.a.t. or the s.a.t., whatever the test, and john get seven out of the ten questions right, jim gets six out of the ten questions right, and jane and it's five out of the ten questions right. well, given what we've heard on the panel we would all be trying to get john and jim into our institution so that they can help solve problems. they got the questions that we asked right or of leased more of them right. but what is jane who only got five questions right got the three questions john dhaka from right? then you might want to actually admit or higher the person that
4:13 pm
got seven questions read and jane that got five questions right because they get information from lots of different perspectives that would be better able to solve difficult problems. this is very similar to the work on collaborative intelligence in which she finds the more women that you have any particular group, up to 80%, the ceq or the collective intelligence or clobber the intelligence of the group goes up once you get 80% then you don't need any more women coming you can actually have some men. [laughter] but the point is we've been measuring the wrong thing in the way in which we are admitting everybody. so that is the plight of this canary is that the people of color -- we are having this conversation that is provoked by peoples objections to racial
4:14 pm
race-based affirmative action and we are claiming the people of color of the problem and. what is the mission of higher education in the democracy and how can we have met a diverse group of potential problems offers not only by race but was a sea of economics, indicators by interest, by goals? that's what we need to be talking about. not are we at mending to many black or latino students for a particular class, and we don't really have any understanding of well, why are we admitting people based on their l.s.a.t. or s.a.t. scores when they are such a week predictor of future performance? of the great things which is i think innovative and something that should be supported but not
4:15 pm
by itself enough, one of the great things of the texas 10% plan is that shows people that did not do particularly well on the s.a.t. but they got in based on their high school grades outperformed what you would have expected given their s.a.t. score with so we are preoccupied with the wrong part of the problem. we are preoccupied with who should be admitted as opposed to what are we looking for in the people that graduate and then we can reason back from that okay then we need diversity of perspectives and diversity of capacity and the capacity to collaborate in order to train the future leaders of the democracy. this is not just about race it's also about gender. the reason i started looking at the issue of the l.a. safety and its relationship to the performances that and the institution - working the women
4:16 pm
were not doing as well as the men in terms of their grades. in fact the had a greater chance of being the top 10% of the class and one and a half times as great a chance the net of 50% of the class and the difference was sustained over the three years. herein saying women are like the canary warning us of a problem we are otherwise ignoring and we tend to think this was the effect of the colleagues of pennsylvania we tend to think the problem is in the canary. we have to fix the canary, the gas mask would somehow allow the women at the university of pennsylvania law school as many elite law schools to perform better. my colleague said we are admitting they're wrong when. they said it must have to do with the varsity sports because the reason that men are doing better is that -- and the women
4:17 pm
have higher undergraduate gpa then again the difference is not statistically different, his explanation was in college the men are preoccupied with varsity sports so that's why they're undergraduate gpa isn't quite as high as the women but they get to wall school and there is no varsity sports so the focus on their grades. i'm not against varsity sports but i don't think that's the reason that the men had a slightly lower gpa them the women, again not statistically significant. the point is in that case it was the women and in the case of fisher i think it is the black and latino students. they are the canary in the coal mine telling us their something wrong in of the way the we value and measure qualifications of who should get into college or law school and i would recommend to people an article called the
4:18 pm
pimple on adonises nos. in this article it's very imaginary. imagine you're at a hospital whose goal in the emergency room was to work with the people who are the most beautiful, so he comes in with a temple on his nose and the emergency room officials run to help him because he has this and it's dislocating his duty but meanwhile there are people in the emergency room having heart attacks and tractors but because their mission was to help those that are both beautiful and they went and fixed, again, using this idea that your mission
4:19 pm
determines your admission you have an institution at the university that says its mission is to help people who don't know very much yet and people who really need the structure of a college education in order to do well in the marketplace. and so somebody comes in and they know three languages and they have very high scores and they've actually been to other institutions and they say no we don't want you coming to are too qualified. that's the universe. they are going to only adamant people that are functionally illiterate because that is our mission. my point is not that we should do either of those things. my point is that we should figure out what is the mission of higher education in the united states? i will argue it is to fulfill the promise of the democracy and therefore we need to have an opportunity to bring people of color, poor people, people who come from rural areas, not just urban areas, but we have to
4:20 pm
rethink the mission of public higher education, and until we do that and you're going to be fighting about lots of different ways to fix a much larger problem. >> there's a lot to unpack, all of the panelists have said. i think maybe i might have erred by asking the question in reverse order something to try to ask is different question to get us started on this. embedded in the report is the esumption which none of us have challenged yet which is that the supreme court is going to rule against affirmative action and fisher so before we go further i would like to throw that around the panel to see what do you see. is it a formal conclusion that the affirmative action is over and his critics that decision but we will start on this and work around.
4:21 pm
>> it is not a foregone conclusion. similar things were said before the university of michigan case, and earlier sam, you invoked the new haven firefighters' case my late bostick that was the lead counsel is john peaden argued the first firefighter challenge under title 74 the u.s. supreme court term after richie and evan bayh said you can't win that case. we saw what happened last term. it's a difficult case and an area that's shrinking and john won the case --0 and and and and scalia wrote the opinion upholding the equal justice principal of the civil rights act. we always hear the prognostication, and there was a whole cottage industry of people whose job it is to count votes and explain what the justices are going to do but here is how these cases present themselves. they present themselves in a
4:22 pm
specific context that calls for the court to get its presidents, but the history and look at the fact on the ground and the fact is on the ground or the affirmative action has been probably properly calibrated as texas has done in this case is an important engine of providing that pathway to opportunity and these leading institutions, these leading colleges are not just any type of tough trade -- pathway. it's recognized that these are important pathways, it was recognized in one of the cases that led to brown v. board because that came out of the university of texas. in that case the chief justice said nobody could seriously doubt that the choice between the segregated academy texas set up for the debate could them to attend and the university of texas law school was a twist a reasonable person would make, and this is the point that the
4:23 pm
court won't mess. the pathway to opportunity is as important today if not more important today than it was nine short years ago when the court took up the case so i would be one that wouldn't cast a vote just yet. >> i should have asked what you're take is on this. >> i actually worked with several people to read amicus briefs in the case supporting the university of texas and part of what motivated me i can't speak for my patriots to write this brief test to detect all the other affirmative action cases from the university of michigan was one of the important affirmative action cases and balky was another. we are from the northern states talking about michigan and talking about washington and california. then we get to texas and many of
4:24 pm
us think of texas as a western state rather than a southern state but i just want to tell you one example of why it is still a southern state, and why it is therefore really important for the university to the weld of its way to make sure all of the people of texas are welcome to attend the anbar represented in this university so here's the story. five weeks after the university of texas, excuse me, five weeks after brown v board of education was decided the university of texas made its own choice. this is after the paynter case and this was to make a new dormitory that had just been built after one of the former professors at the university of texas whose name happened to be colonel shimkus.
4:25 pm
he was at his borneman, it was the name that he adopted because he fought in the confederacy. he not only fought in the confederacy, he then went to florida with his brother and organized the ku klux klan and was involved in the murder of 25 blacks so he was the only confederate, he was a criminal. he was nonetheless the person that they named one of their dormitories after a 1965. that dormitory remains until 2010. we are not talking about past, we are talking about what i would consider part of the contemporary reality. and how did they get to be named? because it turned out a professor of the university of texas went and looked up the history and found out this wasn't necessarily somebody you
4:26 pm
want to use as a role model for your students. they have also already had a brass cannon the libraries of the law students when they can to the library they could rub his head for good luck on their exams. the fact that the university was initially resistant to changing the name of the dorms is troubling. on the other hand, after three months of conversations about is this the image we want to project to the people of texas we are trying to represent a diverse group of future problem solvers. we cannot have dorm's named after people that murdered 25 freed blacks were slaves and we definitely don't want people running ahead of somebody who did that for gridlock on their exam. some people may say he was entitled to his views.
4:27 pm
we all believe in the first amendment but this wasn't about his views this was about his action. the man was a criminal. now, to me that if you go to the daily tech and read the pieces of a number of black and latino students writing in 2012 about how they don't feel welcome at the university of texas because as they walked to their class's the of the past eight monuments to the confederacy. they walk across the campus and somebody calls them nigger. you can't fix all of this simply through your mission's process, but it does suggest -- and again it goes to the mission of what is the university of texas if its mission is to train a diverse group of future leaders for the state of texas because most of those people that admitted to the other city of texas in fact its 90% or more
4:28 pm
people who live in texas so if their commitment is to educate the future leaders of texas they absolutely must have a diverse group of future problem solvers that represent the people of texas and that also have different perspectives so they would come up in the example with solutions to tough problems >> frequently i think there's two reasons people expect them to strike down the race, the change of the personnel in the supreme court said justice kennedy and the michigan cases. justice kennedy who dissented the case is now the swing vote on the supreme court. justice kennedy dissented in large part because he said we
4:29 pm
didn't force the university of michigan to try -- >> american airlines? [laughter] so in the assimilation he looks of the low-income students who score above a thousand on the s.a.t. and then students who just do well above 1300 on the s.a.t. and puts them together on assimilation, so that's giving up to a 300 points preference on the s.a.t. for some students, so i think that is the way to address this to say we are likely to get out entirely and there is a lot of room here for the diamonds in the rough who don't do as well on the standardized test but have an awful lot of promise and to to the obstacles to overcome.
4:30 pm
he did a good job of articulating what are the major myths that some people believe and apparently she believes as well. it's not the case that the credentials that reduced are unrelated to future performance. that is a total red herring. it's not the case that those things penalize underrepresented minorities. if they penalize the represented minorities there on proceeding the above with iain, which yet they would outperform their credentials. maybe get higher grades than are predicted by the scores and the high school grades and show me any study that has shown that usually find the reverse. it's not the case that we can magically just sort of reach down into the low credential pull and find things we're going to transfer much of the rahman college. that happens sometimes that is not the average. and it's very important that we
4:31 pm
distinguish between individuals and groups statistics and it's the case that if you look at all schools for example and take a combination of the scores and create an index that is used in the missions the individual correlation between the individual index and how they will do on the exam leader is about .4. that's not a great correlation but if you look at 100 students who have a higher index it's about .96. an almost perfect predictor and that is with that officers are doing. they are not saying i think joe estherville platts bet on him. they are saying we have to do another class and a decision about thousands of students to distinguish among them. that said, it's true that the standardized test scores the university of california the move to a system where they get high year wheat and if you screen out the malaise and look
4:32 pm
at the same courses for different students and get rid of the gym class and so on than the high school grades are a better predictor so that texas result is understandable and consistent with research but the idea that the standardized test scores and credentials have nothing to do with all of this is just nonsense. when we are trying to create programs that work its vital that we not ignore the preference being used and if we do we are creating failures because they are going to school where they're less likely to graduate and to persist in the scientific field they want to study and they will have lower grades and less self confidence and they are going to have the worst long-term outcome. we need to be cognizant to be we are not doing a favor by getting the ticket in the school with any incentive to fail. transparency is vital to see how
4:33 pm
the programs are working. we have to have transparency so we understand what is the effect of doing different strategies. >> i think both of you want to comment >> i want to respond to what rikus said because i'm happy to show him the data that i have seen that jim and his team when i was a voting rights lawyer for the naacp if we went into a particular community to show that it was racially polarized, we had to show there was a relationship between the race of the voter and the candidates 80% of the time and even if we showed that there was tightly correlated 80% of the time sometimes the judge would say burn as the other 20% because they expect if you're planning a voting is racially polarized the you have a strong relationship between the race of the person that is voting and the candidate that the choose. then i'd get to choose the university of pennsylvania and
4:34 pm
we see that the scores explain 14% of the difference in the first year. 15% in the second year law school grades. i think rick has acknowledged your grades are a better predictor of your performance than your l.s.a.t. score. nobody wants to admit that. on the other hand it also raises a second question how or retrain people to give lawyers in the 21st century? we are still using and methodology large classrooms, which often don't purchase of feet in the same extent as men this is something that we have been doing for 100 years and then 21st century we haven't changed the pedagogies again it goes back to my earlier point to determine whether people can answer questions under pressure
4:35 pm
or is it a way of actually turning people to learn how to be good lawyers in the 21st century which requires the capacity to collaborate and and connect with your clients who are not represented on your l.s.a.t. score were undergraduate grade and there's lots of things that are not taught in law school. my basic point is this is an opportunity for us to rethink the mission of the institution of higher education consistent with our commitment to being a robust democracy where there is equal opportunity for all of us. >> another factor that i think complicates the use of class and one of the reasons i said you
4:36 pm
can't just think that this is an across-the-board subsidy is the fact that this isn't just about some of the latinas compared to whites. if you throw in the fact that in california and is largely a of asians who happen to be higher performing academically and lower-income in many cases fan if you are deluding yourself the thinking that you are going to increase the number of unrepresented students isn't going to happen probably because the vietnamese students will fill the void. as we found in california the number of asians went from 22% to about 40% i believe i don't
4:37 pm
care whether a campus personally as all pink or purple or but don't think that this is going to have a huge effect in some settings on the number of. >> there is a woman right here in the front. >> i am surely with the american association for affirmative action, and our membership includes people who actually do affirmative action and the colleges and universities for a living so we're kind of intimately connected to this issue. i want to commend you for your persistence. i've been reading a lot about your mantra about social economic status for quite awhile. i do want to commend you about that. but we are not clear about is why this notion of a zero sum
4:38 pm
game why is it that either were in the race or socioeconomic status when both should be issued for colleges and universities and one of address in his first of all race was still a matter. everyone could agree with that but also what we find this whites outperform the represented minorities and tenorist testing within the same income group. the socioeconomic status will not necessarily resolve that and that question -- >> with him respond to that and then we will get more questions because we only have about ten minutes. >> okay. go ahead. >> so, why not do both. i've been watching this issue for 20 years, and hearing that argument let's just do both
4:39 pm
economic and racial affirmative action, and the truth is if you get this into replete, universities are very conscious of racial diversity. i think because it is far more visible so it's more accountable and it's more embarrassing to them if they are not racially diverse. economic diversity is invisible. it's something that you don't necessarily see when you walk around campus so that's why we continue to have this phenomena where rich kids out number poor kids 25-1 and the one time i've seen any universities show concern about the socio-economic university is when it's the only way they can get racial diversity and often unfortunate fact of life that is what we're dealing with. in terms of the issue of
4:40 pm
operational dividend of affirmative action with the life of similar income subjects have higher test scores that's true, and i think if you pursue affirmative action based on the income alone, and you wouldn't see much racial diversity. but that's not what i advocate. i advocate on this program implemented at ucla where they look at a number of factors that acknowledge in our society black poverty is some research to suggest that middle-income within neighborhoods with even higher in poverty than low-income whites. that is a huge disadvantage on african-americans. but that can be captured through economic analysis and the other fact is there are other
4:41 pm
disadvantages that african-americans but can be captured and should become captured in the affirmative action program. i raised this the other day with gary, and he said that would be interested to look at all these different factors in the neighborhood and the like. but in kawlija emissions this is the one area where people felt fafsa and it tells you wealth and income and the address and the concentrated poverty, so i want to see universities that are both economically the reverse to the universities can emit the upper middle class students that's with a rather dim.
4:42 pm
80% fought the institutions for middle class or upper class according to balk. so i think given the reality the cost disadvantage matters so much in today's society we have to take that issue head-on. >> i think that is going to be my last question. >> kenneth joseph, ceq press. since professor ander dhaka tuesday the mismatch about using that term, i wanted to have the folks on this side of the audio on the podium address it. is he right that affirmative action at mets are doomed to fail at the school they are out that? >> there is a brief that you need to look at and need to be aware of that was filed by 11
4:43 pm
empirical scholars that puts very serious holes in the ship that mr. sander is sailing. it criticizes the methodology that he uses. they also point out that it is not widely embraced and that more sound social science actually has reached contrary and contradictory findings. we've represent a legal defense fund in this case and have represented for a long time the student alliance at the university of texas and when you talk to the students and you see their experiences, i think that you quickly learn that college is not exclusively a reserve of the wealthy and privileged but for many folks it is an important opportunity to move from one circumstance to another circumstance and to participate in all of the things we hope people would have access to an american society with that is in
4:44 pm
our own experience with my client's experience, so i commend to you the amicus brief files by 11 empirical scholars leading empirical scholars to have a look at the social science that mr. sander is offering him on that point i would say that the empirical scholars brief is actually wrong in its characterization of the research. the studies that suggested are not in very few publications that have found these effects but i would personally challenge any of those scholars come any of those folks would like to have a debate judged by the scientists who can agree on i would be happy to engage in that for the winner. >> and we've gotten to the end of the discussion. i would like to thank of the panelists. thank you very much from the
4:45 pm
education fund, ward connelly, richard of the century foundation and richard sander of the ucla school fall and thank you all for being with us. [applause] >> this is the fourth district
4:46 pm
congressional debate will. >> now here is the moderator good evening everyone. welcome on the campus of northwestern college here in iowa for the fourth district congressional debate between republican steve king and democrat christi vilsack. from sioux city iowa one of three television stations that his partner tonight to broadcast this debate to two-thirds of the state of iowa. >> i'm from kcctv serving mason city and much of northeast iowa. we are joined on the panel tonight by and guinn ann. >> also on the panel tonight, dan green, no relation for the northwest on a lovely view. tonight we hope there are questions those from northwestern college students, the readers and viewers will
4:47 pm
help you make an informed choice on november 6th. so let's start by meeting the candidates for the fourth district congressional seat. steve king is a five term congressman who is represented by iran's congressional district since 2002. christy vilsack is the former first lady of fallujah who served as president of the foundation which partnered with the national center for family literacy to promote media literacy with parents and their kids. now that you have had a chance to meet the candidates, it is time to hear from each candidate and we will get 90 seconds each for their opening statement. for the debate we flipped a coin to see who goes first and tonight that honor goes to christi vilsack. >> vilsack: thanks to northwestern for having us here and to my husband for coming. i thank god every day but i have him by my side. i'm running for congress for one reason and that is to make sure
4:48 pm
that people can continue to live in small towns in this district, towns much like the one that we are sitting in right now. i have a plan to rebuild the middle class and the small towns across this district and the year based on three things, based on the innovation, education and connection. i want to make sure that we build a work force with our really strong educational facilities and our strong educational program. i want to make sure that we build on what we have already done in innovation with renewable fuels and i want to make sure that we build the connections that we need that we finish highway 20 in short rail and that we make sure we connect every town and for college, every community in the state with high-speed internet and broadband. you know my dad always said if the farmers are doing well we are all doing well and that is just as true today as it was when he was saying it in the 1950's. but, today i want to dedicate
4:49 pm
this debate to the farmers of this district especially the young farmers. i've been talking to a lot of them recently, and there are young farmers who worry about the farm bill because they no longer will have opportunity for the young program. there are leaders worried about the pell grant and worried about conservation. >> moderator: commerce and king. king: thank you for hosting this. this is the place i really wanted to come for the date and i appreciate the atmosphere is a lot of on this conversation. there are four generations of kings that live in this district and we were married 40 years ago. we have three grown sons they are all entrepreneurs and their own life and live within 10 miles of our house and our roots go deep. the only known one father, one
4:50 pm
mother, one church, one house, one school. and our grandchildren and our sons and daughters, daughter-in-law, can go to church together and come back to our home and fix a great big runge on the deck and fight over the swing and win again has to set the timer in order that they don't fight over the swing. i know life is as good as it can get. i started a business in 1975. that has been a foundation for me. i represented all 32 counties here in western iowa now for ten years. when i was nominated i said then i will go to all 286 towns in the 32 counties all the way to missouri. i did and i continued my i've got to all 382 tons in the 39 counties in the fourth congressional district to i live here. my roots are here and they are going to stay here whatever happens in november. [applause] >> moderator: thank you, congressman king. now the question for the panel
4:51 pm
to each candidate has one minute to answer the question to each candidate will then get 30 seconds for rebuttal time. as moderator have the option to ask a question of my own, and in that case, each candidate gets 30 seconds apiece to answer my follow-up. we will also be taking questions on rhetoric, so if you do tweet please do and we will get those on the air tonight. so long gone to twitter and ps2 to use the handle ktivelection all one word. for the congressional debate this comes from my colleague over kttc for mr. king first. >> the national debt talks $16 trillion earlier in the month. for years we have heard candidates campaigned on platforms and reducing the national debt. only to see the election in washington, d.c.. if you are elected, what would you do to help reduce our debt? king: i will continue down the path that i have been on, and i
4:52 pm
have long pushed to bring it all once the budget to the floor of the house of representatives. it took several years to get that done. i am pushing very hard, and i am asking mitt romney to call for a mandate for the american people to pass a balanced budget amendment out of the house and the senate. it takes a bully pulpit for the presidency to get this done. it's not going to be accomplished i don't believe with a configuration we have here today. you need to send a constitutional, fiscal conservatives to congress to join me. my notes are clear. there are ten votes out there simply that save $17.4 trillion at my colleagues follow that lead would not only have a balanced budget, but we would also have eliminated or national debt. it takes that kind of conviction to tighten things down and my record shows that. i will continue down that path. thank you. >> if you really liked it what would you do to reduce the national debt? vilsack: i think it depends on balance. we need balance, we need targeted cuts, we need targeted spending, and we need to ask
4:53 pm
people that make a million dollars to pay a little bit more. congressman king has talked about a balanced budget amendment, which i think is a gimmick. i think that congress could go into a room right now and balance the budget and congressman king has had ten years to balance the budget and he hasn't done it yet. when he came into office it was $6 trillion now it is $16 trillion. i think it is about coming together and finding bipartisan support and i think that he could have done that. i also think that congressman king has the opportunity to balance the budget and instead, he was involved in two wars which he didn't pay for. also, he gave tax cuts to people that need more than a million dollars, and didn't pay for medicare pat

118 Views

info Stream Only

Uploaded by TV Archive on